Exploring Diverse Features for Sentiment Quantification Using Machine Learning Algorithms

In the era of web 2.0, online forums, blogs and Twitter are becoming primary sources for sharing views, opinions and comments about different topics. Classifying these views, opinions and comments is known as sentiment analysis which is an active research area. Sentiment analysis has vast applications in different fields of life, such as marketing, e-commerce and business. Under the umbrella of sentiment analysis, sentiment quantification that deals with estimating relative frequency of class of interest is being investigated by researchers nowadays. In sentiment quantification, exploring effect of new features and comparison of diverse types of classifiers to assess their effectiveness needs further investigation. In this paper, we explore diverse feature sets and classifiers for sentiment quantification. In addition, empirical performance analysis of conventional machine learning techniques, ensemble-based methods and state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms on basis of features set, is performed. The computed results show that the diverse features sets affect the performance of classifiers in sentiment quantification. The results also confirm that the deep learning techniques perform better than the conventional machine learning algorithms.