A New Feature Selection Method for Sentiment Analysis in Short Text

Abstract

In recent internet era, micro-blogging sites produce enormous amount of short textual information, which appears in the form of opinions or sentiments of users. Sentiment analysis is a challenging task in short text, due to use of formal language, misspellings, and shortened forms of words, which leads to high dimensionality and sparsity. In order to deal with these challenges, this paper proposes a novel, simple, and yet effective feature selection method, to select frequently distributed features related to each class. In this paper, the feature selection method is based on class-wise information, to identify the relevant feature related to each class. We evaluate the proposed feature selection method by comparing with existing feature selection methods like chi-square ( χ2), entropy, information gain, and mutual information. The performances are evaluated using classification accuracy obtained from support vector machine, K nearest neighbors, and random forest classifiers on two publically available datasets viz., Stanford Twitter dataset and Ravikiran Janardhana dataset. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed feature selection method, we conducted extensive experimentation by selecting different feature sets. The proposed feature selection method outperforms the existing feature selection methods in terms of classification accuracy on the Stanford Twitter dataset. Similarly, the proposed method performs competently equally in terms of classification accuracy compared to other feature selection methods in most of the feature subsets on Ravikiran Janardhana dataset.

Keywords

• feature selection
• sentiment analysis
• short text
• classification
• 68u15