Sentiment Analysis of Customers’ Reviews Using a Hybrid Evolutionary SVM-Based Approach in an Imbalanced Data Distribution

Abstract

Online media has an increasing presence on the restaurants’ activities through social media websites, coinciding with an increase in customers’ reviews of these restaurants. These reviews become the main source of information for both customers and decision-makers in this field. Any customer who is seeking such places will check their reviews first, which usually affect their final choice. In addition, customers’ experiences can be enhanced by utilizing other customers’ suggestions. Consequently, customers’ reviews can influence the success of restaurant business since it is considered the final judgment of the overall quality of any restaurant. Thus, decision-makers need to analyze their customers’ underlying sentiments in order to meet their expectations and improve the restaurants’ services, in terms of food quality, ambiance, price range, and customer service. The number of reviews available for various products and services has dramatically increased these days and so has the need for automated methods to collect and analyze these reviews. Sentiment Analysis (SA) is a field of machine learning that helps analyze and predict the sentiments underlying these reviews. Usually, SA for customers’ reviews face imbalanced datasets challenge, as the majority of these sentiments fall into supporters or resistors of the product or service. This work proposes a hybrid approach by combining the Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and different oversampling techniques to handle the imbalanced data problem. SVM is applied as a machine learning classification technique to predict the sentiments of reviews by optimizing the dataset, which contains different reviews of several restaurants in Jordan. Data were collected from Jeeran, a well-known social network for Arabic reviews. A PSO technique is used to optimize the weights of the features, as well as four different oversampling techniques, namely, the Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE), SVM-SMOTE, Adaptive Synthetic Sampling (ADASYN) and borderline-SMOTE were examined to produce an optimized dataset and solve the imbalanced problem of the dataset. This study shows that the proposed PSO-SVM approach produces the best results compared to different classification techniques in terms of accuracy, F-measure, G-mean and Area Under the Curve (AUC), for different versions of the datasets.

Keywords

• Sentiment analysis
• SVM
• PSO
• SMOTE
• oversampling
• feature extraction