Sentiment Analysis for Predicting Customer Reviews using a Hybrid Approach

Sentiment Analysis is a widely used text classification technique. It breaks down any given text or comments and classify the text either as positive or negative based on the views conveyed in it. Previous works done on sentiment classification used either lexicon based approach or machine learning techniques. Likewise, the major drawback of the existing systems was the focus on only binary classification of review such as positive or negative. Ignorance of the neutral review will result in misinterpretation of a customer’s opinion about a product or movie, which will degrade the business or trend. In case of using only lexicon based approach, the system highly depends on the selection of lexicon resource and dictionary. In case of system built only using machine learning approach, the performance of the system depends on the algorithms chosen. This work presents a hybrid model to resolve the neutral class too. The proposed work combines a lexical approach (SentiWordNet) with the machine learning algorithms such as Support Vector Machine, Decision Tree, Logistic Regression and Naive Bayes for sentiment analysis to resolve the neutral opinions beyond the binary categorization of the customer’s review. We have also compared the performance of these four machine learning algorithms along with the lexicon approach. The results proved that Support Vector Machine and Logistic Regression algorithms outperform the other two algorithms with an accuracy of about 80% which is on average differs by 6% to 10% when compared to other algorithms.