Mine the easy, classify the hard: a semi-supervised approach to automatic sentiment classification

  • Authors:
  • Sajib Dasgupta;Vincent Ng

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX;University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX

  • Venue:
  • ACL '09 Proceedings of the Joint Conference of the 47th Annual Meeting of the ACL and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP: Volume 2 - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Supervised polarity classification systems are typically domain-specific. Building these systems involves the expensive process of annotating a large amount of data for each domain. A potential solution to this corpus annotation bottleneck is to build unsupervised polarity classification systems. However, unsupervised learning of polarity is difficult, owing in part to the prevalence of sentimentally ambiguous reviews, where reviewers discuss both the positive and negative aspects of a product. To address this problem, we propose a semi-supervised approach to sentiment classification where we first mine the unambiguous reviews using spectral techniques and then exploit them to classify the ambiguous reviews via a novel combination of active learning, transductive learning, and ensemble learning.