An artificial neural network based approach for sentiment analysis of opinionated text

The Internet and Web 2.0 social media have emerged as an important medium for expressing sentiments, opinions, evaluations, and reviews. Sentiment analysis or opinion mining is becoming an open research domain due to the abundance of discussion forums, Weblogs, e-commerce portals, social networking and content sharing sites where people tend to express their opinions. Sentiment Analysis involves classifying text documents based on the opinion expressed being positive or negative about a given topic. This paper proposes a sentiment classification model using back-propagation artificial neural network (BPANN). Information Gain and three popular sentiment lexicons are used to extract sentiment representing features that are then used to train and test the BPANN. This novel approach combines the strength of BPANN in classification accuracy with utilizing intrinsic domain knowledge available in the sentiment lexicons. The results obtained on the movie-review corpora have shown that the proposed approach has been able to reduce dimensionality, while producing accurate sentiment based classification of text.