Comparison of feature selection methods for sentiment analysis on Turkish Twitter data

The Internet and social media provide a major source of information about people's opinions. Due to the rapidly growing number of online documents, it becomes both time-consuming and hard task to obtain and analyze the desired opinionated information. Sentiment analysis is the classification of sentiments expressed in documents. To improve classification perfromance feature selection methods which help to identify the most valuable features are generally applied. In this paper, we compare the performance of four feature selection methods namely Chi-square, Information Gain, Query Expansion Ranking, and Ant Colony Optimization using Maximum Entropi Modeling classification algorithm over Turkish Twitter dataset. Therefore, the effects of feature selection methods over the performance of sentiment analysis of Turkish Twitter data are evaluated. Experimental results show that Query Expansion Ranking and Ant Colony Optimization methods outperform other traditional feature selection methods for sentiment analysis.