Target-dependent Twitter sentiment classification

  • Authors:

  • Long Jiang;Mo Yu;Ming Zhou;Xiaohua Liu;Tiejun Zhao

  • Affiliations:

  • Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China;Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China;Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China;Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China;Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China

  • Venue:
  • HLT '11 Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies - Volume 1
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Sentiment analysis on Twitter data has attracted much attention recently. In this paper, we focus on target-dependent Twitter sentiment classification; namely, given a query, we classify the sentiments of the tweets as positive, negative or neutral according to whether they contain positive, negative or neutral sentiments about that query. Here the query serves as the target of the sentiments. The state-of-the-art approaches for solving this problem always adopt the target-independent strategy, which may assign irrelevant sentiments to the given target. Moreover, the state-of-the-art approaches only take the tweet to be classified into consideration when classifying the sentiment; they ignore its context (i.e., related tweets). However, because tweets are usually short and more ambiguous, sometimes it is not enough to consider only the current tweet for sentiment classification. In this paper, we propose to improve target-dependent Twitter sentiment classification by 1) incorporating target-dependent features; and 2) taking related tweets into consideration. According to the experimental results, our approach greatly improves the performance of target-dependent sentiment classification.