Leveraging Semantic and Sentiment Knowledge for User-Generated Text Sentiment Classification

Abstract

Sentiment analysis is essential to process and understand unstructured user-generated content for better data analytics and decision-making. State-of-the-art techniques suffer from a high dimensional feature space because of noisy and irrelevant features from the noisy user-generated text. Our goal is to mitigate such problems using DNN-based text classification and popular word embeddings (Glove, fastText, and BERT) in conjunction with statistical filter feature selection (mRMR and PCA) to select relevant sentiment features and pick out unessential/irrelevant ones. We propose an effective way of integrating the traditional feature construction methods with the DNN-based methods to improve the performance of sentiment classification. We evaluate our model on three real-world benchmark datasets demonstrating that our proposed method improves the classification performance of several existing methods.