The sentimental factor: improving review classification via human-provided information

  • Authors:
  • Philip Beineke;Trevor Hastie;Shivakumar Vaithyanathan

  • Affiliations:
  • Stanford University, Stanford, CA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA;IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA

  • Venue:
  • ACL '04 Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Sentiment classification is the task of labeling a review document according to the polarity of its prevailing opinion (favorable or unfavorable). In approaching this problem, a model builder often has three sources of information available: a small collection of labeled documents, a large collection of unlabeled documents, and human understanding of language. Ideally, a learning method will utilize all three sources. To accomplish this goal, we generalize an existing procedure that uses the latter two.We extend this procedure by re-interpreting it as a Naive Bayes model for document sentiment. Viewed as such, it can also be seen to extract a pair of derived features that are linearly combined to predict sentiment. This perspective allows us to improve upon previous methods, primarily through two strategies: incorporating additional derived features into the model and, where possible, using labeled data to estimate their relative influence.