Feature Space Augmentation for Negation Handling on Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

One crucial issue affecting the performance of sentiment analysis tasks is negation. Handling negation involves determining the negation scope and negation cue. Feature space augmentation is one approach used to address negation. Feature space augmentation has been carried out by some previous researchers using a negation flag with the rule that the negation scope includes all words from the explicit negation cue to the punctuation mark. This study aimed to analyze the classifier's performance when negation handling was applied by adding a new rule for the negation scope. The new rule for determining the negation scope no longer took all words from the negation cue to the punctuation mark, but only considered or ignored words with certain POS tags. The results of this study showed that using the new rule for negation scope contributed to improving the performance of the classifier in sentiment analysis tasks. The proposed approach for negation handling was better than the previous approach in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and f1-score.