Thumbs up?

Sentiment Classification using Machine Learning Techniques

- Bo Pang and Lillian Lee - Shivakumar Vaithyanathan

What is it??
Input raw text over some topic Output opinion ( +ve, -ve or neutral ) Its is hard why??? - determines the opinion on overall text rather than just subject of the topic

-- lets understand the problem

We know
Web enormous amount of data Topical categorization active research

Rise of blogs, forums

Web 2.0 is commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web (source : Wikipedia)

Why is it interesting?
Represents the voice about particular topic from broader audience Example : product reviews, movie reviews, book reviews Important to business intelligence applications - What do people (dis)like in Nikon D40

What this paper does

Examines the effectiveness of applying machine learning techniques to sentiment classification problem Challenging while topic are identifiable by keywords alone, sentiment can be expressed in a more subtle manner.

Dataset : Movie-Review Domain

Reason :
Large online collection for reviews Easy to summarize with machine-extractable rating indicator than to handle data for supervised learning
Corpus of 752 ve, 1301 +ve, with total 144 reviewers represented

Nave approach
Idea: people tend to use certain words to express strong sentiments, produce such list and rely to classify text

Machine Learning methods

Let {f1, f2, , fm} be predefined m features that can appear in document.Example : still or bigram really stinks ni(d) number of times fi occurs in document d Document vector(d) = (n1(d), n2(d), , nm(d))

Nave Bayes
Assign to a given document d the class Nave Bayes rule :

Maximum Entropy

Idea is to make fewest assumptions about the data while still being consistent with it

Support Vector Machines(SVM)

Are large-margin, non-probabilistic classifiers in contrast to Nave Bayes and Maximum Entropy Letting (corresponding to +ve,ve), be the correct class of document dj,

Evaluations
Randomly selected 700 positive, 700 negative sentiment documents Automatically removed rating indicators, extracted textual information from original HTML Added NOT_ to every word between a negation word(not, isnt) and first punctuation.

Results

Conclusion
Unigram presence information turned out to be most effective The superiority of presence information in comparison to feature frequency indicates a difference between sentiment and topic categorization.