3.1 Preprocessing and feature extraction

The features that we used in this study for the sentiment analysis of documents are as follows:

1. • Term frequency: The frequency of a word is an indicator about the importance of that word. As in several types of classification problems, this feature is widely used in the sentiment classification task. The frequency of a word is an indicator about the importance of that word. As a variation of term frequency, we used the tf-idf metric.

2. • POS tag: Some POS tags may carry more salient information than the other tags in sentiment analysis. For instance, adjectives are usually considered the key sentiment-bearing words. However, all the words with any POS tag can also be used. We employed both of these strategies in identifying the features. Different morphological analysis and disambiguation tools can be used in different languages to extract the POS tags of the words.

3. • Sentiment words and phrases: As mentioned, adjectives are good indicators for expressing opinions. Nevertheless, verbs, such as love, adverbs, such as fascinatingly, and out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words, such as 9/10, can also serve as features. In addition, phrases can be used to express sentiments (e.g., “cost someone an arm and a leg”). We, therefore, took all of them into account to evaluate how they contribute to the performance.

4. • Sentiment shifting: Negation words may cause the sentiment to change. For example, the sentence “I did not like it much” is of negative polarity, although it contains a positive sentiment word, which is like. But the use of this negation word (not) does not always imply that the sentiment has to shift, as in “I adored not only her elegance, but also her intelligence.” In this case, the sentiment word adore still has a positive meaning. We made use of the negation words and suffixes used in Turkish for sentiment shifting.

5. • Rules of opinions: Some rules may be applied while extracting sentiment features. For instance, if the word less or more is used, the sentiment word following it can be assigned a different score. Another one would be that if an entity consumes a resource in large quantities, as in “this washer uses up a lot of water,” it would be assigned a negative score, or if it rather contributes to the production, a positive score. We applied a set of intensifiers that cause a relative increase or decrease in the scores of the words.

Using all the words except those whose frequency is below a threshold value improved the performance. During the feature extraction stage, we applied the following preprocessing operations:

1. • While writing a text in Turkish, people sometimes prefer to use English characters for the corresponding Turkish characters, such as u (guzel) for ü (güzel (beautiful)). We use the Zemberek tool (Akın and Akın Reference Akın and Akın2007) to correct these characters.

2. • We do not remove emoticons, such as “:)” and “:(”, since they carry sentiment information. If the constituent characters of these emoticons are repeated, we normalize them such that this extra information is not lost (e.g., “:((((” is normalized as “:((”). In order to capture all of these kinds of emoticons, we use regular expressions.

3. • We remove all punctuation marks except “?”, “(!)”, and “!”, since they do not contribute to the sentiment expression. If a reviewer spells the exclamation mark(s) repeatedly in a sequence (e.g., “?!”), he/she most probably intends to express a negative sentiment. For instance, in the sentence “And you say that she is beautiful??!!,” it is apparent that the reviewer emphasizes a negative fact concerned with some entity (person).

4. • Similar to the repetition in punctuation marks, we assume that words with repeated characters (e.g., müthişşşş (greatttt)) are used for emphasis and we increase the score of such words. In addition, we assign a larger score to uppercased words. However, if all the words in a review are uppercased, we assume that there are no emphasized words, and there is no extra information to be exploited for sentiment classification.

5. • After performing these normalization processes, we also apply the İTÜ tool (Torunoğlu and Eryiğit Reference Torunoğlu and Eryiğit2014) to find other unnormalized tokens that the previous techniques could not detect.

6. • We then feed the words as input into the morphological parsing Sak, Güngör, and Saraçlar (Reference Sak, Güngör and Saraçlar2008) and disambiguation Sak, Güngör, and Saraçlar (Reference Sak, Güngör and Saraçlar2007) tools and obtain the morphological analysis of each word. In the methods that we use in this work, we consider three cases for the words: root form, surface form, and partial surface form (Section 3.2). Since Turkish is an agglutinative language and has a rich morphological structure, it is possible that the removal of suffixes may hamper the performance. The use of three different schemes enables us to observe the effect of suffixes in sentiment analysis.

Apart from these operations, we perform intensification, negation handling, and stop word elimination while determining the features. In Turkish, words can be negated as follows:

1. • The word değil (not) shifts the sentiment/semantic orientation of the word it follows. For instance, in “hoş değil bu şarkı” (this song is not nice), the positive word hoş (nice) is negated.

2. • Some verbal morphemes in Turkish (e.g., ma/me) switch the semantic orientation of the verbs. For example, sevdim (I liked) is of positive polarity, whereas sevmedim (I did not like) has a negative orientation.

3. • The word yok (there is not) makes the word it follows “absent.” For instance, in the sentence “umut yok artık” (there is no hope anymore), the word umut (hope) has no effect after it is followed by yok.

4. • Another case for negation is the use of the morphemes sız, siz, suz, and süz. For example, umutsuz (hopeless) has a negated meaning.

The morphological parser and disambiguation tools we utilize detect whether or not a word has a negation morpheme. When a negation morpheme or word is detected, we add an underscore at the end of the root of the negated word. For example, if the word is sevmedim (I did not love), the feature would be defined as sev_. In the case that negation morphemes/words occur consecutively, the negation effect is removed. For example, in the sentence “tatsız değil” (it is not tasteless), one negation morpheme and one negation word come one after another, so the statement loses its negative form. Therefore, we do not negate the token tat (taste) in this case.

In the stop word elimination phase, we exclude some words that function as stop words in general domain, but that have a sentiment-bearing role in sentiment analysis. For instance, the words çok (very) and bayağı (quite) intensify the polarity scores of the words following them. In this case, the intensifying word is eliminated, but the score of the word it modifies is increased. If there are repeating occurrences of these intensifiers, as in “çok çok güzel” (“very very beautiful”), the score of the word they intensify increases even more. Also, some words contribute to the intensification process more than others. For instance, the word daha (more) modifies the meaning of the following word less than the word en (most). Therefore, we assign different scores to these modifiers, which are to be used in the classification stage.

The range of polarity scores of the words is $(\!-\infty, \infty)$ . The polarity of a word is multiplied by $-1$ when negation occurs. In the case of double negation, the score does not change. We divided the intensifiers into several groups. For the intensifier “more” and its equivalents (“very,” “quite,” etc.), we multiply the score of the related word by 1.2. On the other hand, in case the modifier words “less” and its equivalents (“so so,” “a little,” etc.) occur in the text, we multiply the score of the affected word by 0.8. If a sequence of intensifiers occurs, the multiplicative factor becomes $1.2^{x}$ for the strengthening modifiers and $0.8^{x}$ for the weakening modifiers, where x is the number of intensifiers appearing consecutively. For the other intensifier, “most,” the score of the word is multiplied by 1.5, and for “least,” it is multiplied by 0.5. The weight parameters were determined empirically by observing their effects on the two corpora.

We aim to build sentiment analysis models in this work that can be applied both to datasets with standard spelling (e.g., movie reviews) and also to datasets with a different jargon (e.g., Twitter). We eliminate words occurring less than a threshold (we use 20 as the threshold for the movie dataset and 5 for the Twitter dataset) to decrease the noise. In order to be able to cover the Twitter case, we tweak the normalization process further. We eliminate uniform resource locators (URL), since these kinds of tokens do not contribute to the sentimental meaning of a tweet. However, we keep the hashtags in the tweets since hashtags were reported to contribute to the sentiment (Davidov, Tsur, and Rappoport Reference Davidov, Tsur and Rappoport2010). This was also supported by our preliminary experiments. The preprocessing steps on an example tweet are shown in Table 2. In this example, the roots of the words are used.

Table 2.

A sample tweet and effect of each preprocessing operation in the pipeline

In addition to using unigrams (tokens) only as features, we also utilize patterns and multiword expressions (MWEs) which are formed of word n-grams (for $n > 1$ ). We make use of the TDK (Türk Dil Kurumu—Turkish Language Institution) dictionary to extract MWEs, such as idioms. A multiword term may have an effect on the sentiment that cannot be observed by the constituent words. For instance, the idiom “nalları dikmek” (to kick the bucket, literally “to raise the horseshoes up in the air”) has a negative sentimental meaning, whereas its constituent words are mostly neutral. Patterns are obtained as bigrams, where the consecutive two words conform to a set of rules based on the POS tags, as in Turney (Reference Turney2002). For example, the pattern rule “adverb+adjective” extracts each occurrence of an adverb followed by an adjective as a bigram feature. As will be seen in Section 4.3, while the use of MWEs in addition to the unigram features contributes to the performance of the classifier, this is not the case for patterns.

3.2 Additional preprocessing step: partial surface forms

The morphologically rich structure of Turkish makes it possible to extract and use some additional features in classification tasks. In most of the studies, either the root forms or the surface forms of the words are used (Yıldırım et al. Reference Yıldırım, Çetin, Eryiğit and Temel2014). However, in the domain of sentiment classification, some morphemes carry more sentimental information than the others. For instance, the suffix -cağız as in “kızcağız” (poor girl) denotes a sentiment of pity. As another example, conditional morphemes in Turkish, such as -se/-sa as in “keşke çalışsa” (I wish he/she worked), are indicative of expressing wishes or sentiments indirectly. Therefore, in this work, we take account of these morphemes while building the feature set, in addition to using the surface and root forms of the words as features. In our datasets, we have a set of 114 distinct morpheme tags.

We use an approach formed of two steps. In the first step, we compute the polarity scores of all the words in surface form using the delta tf-idf metric (see Equation (7)). Then, we parse and disambiguate the words using the morphological tools (Sak et al. Reference Sak, Güngör and Saraçlar2007; Sak et al. Reference Sak, Güngör and Saraçlar2008) to extract the morphemes. By assuming that a morpheme in a word has the same polarity score as that word, the polarity score of each morpheme is computed by taking the average of the scores of the words in which it is used. For instance, if the morpheme -se/-sa occurs in two words in the corpus, whose surface forms are sevse (I wish he/she liked) and izlese (I wish he/she watched), the polarity score of the morpheme -se/-sa is computed as the average score of the delta tf-idf scores of these two words. We then choose a percentage of the morphemes with the highest confidence scores. While selecting the morphemes, we take into account the following issues:

1. 1. Negation morphemes: Regardless of their polarity scores, we do not eliminate the negation morphemes. These morphemes have a significant role in later processing where they cause a shift on the sentiments.

2. 2. Type and number of discriminating morphemes: When forming the set of discriminating morphemes, we include the same number of positive morphemes and negative morphemes. We observed that if the morphemes are selected based on their absolute scores without taking into account an equal sentiment distribution, the results are biased toward the polarity of the majority class. In the experiments, we also test with different percentages of top morphemes, ranging from 10% to 90% in increments of 10. This makes it possible comparing the amount of morpheme usage with root forms (no morphemes) and surface forms (all morphemes).

3. 3. Root forms: We only remove morphemes with low discriminating scores. However, we do not remove the POS tags of root forms no matter what their delta tf-idf scores are. Its reason is that we perform a morphological analysis here and the roots of the words are independent of this process.

4. 4. Using several corpora: During the training phase, the morpheme scores are computed using the training part of the dataset. In addition to this usual setting, we also analyze the effect of incorporating other corpora into the process. While working on sentiment analysis on a domain (dataset), we extract the morpheme scores using both the training part of this dataset and the entire dataset of the other domain. The score of a morpheme is computed as the average of its scores calculated separately on the two datasets. The process can be generalized to more than two datasets easily. As will be stated in the experiments, we observed that using additional information by the use of other domains provides generalization and prevents overfitting.

In the second step, after the morpheme polarity lexicon is built, all the words are processed again and the morphemes that are not in the set of the discriminating morphemes identified in the first step are stripped off the surface form. That is, we obtain a form of the word that is formed of the root and the discriminating morphemes, which we name as the partial surface form. For instance, if the morpheme -se/-sa has a high score, but the score of the possessive morpheme -m is below the threshold, then the word sevsem (I wish I liked) changes into sevse by removing the morpheme -m. In this way, the words sevsem and sevse (and possibly some other derived forms) are reduced to the same partial form. After the partial surface forms are obtained, they are used in the proposed methods as in the same way as the root forms and the surface forms. We observed in the experiments that the use of partial surface form yields better results than the surface form and the root form. The reason is that the partial form provides us with additional supervised information related to morphemes.

3.3 Unsupervised and semi-supervised approaches

Most of the studies carried out for sentiment analysis in Turkish use supervised techniques (e.g., Kulcu and Doğdu Reference Kulcu and Doğdu2016). These studies implement various feature selection and extraction methods. Despite the diversity of the supervised approaches, the only unsupervised approach for extracting sentiments in Turkish is the one that is based on translating the sentiment lexical databases into Turkish and performing further analyses (Vural et al. Reference Vural, Cambazoğlu, Şenkul and Tokgöz2012; Türkmenoğlu and Tantuğ Reference Türkmenoğlu and Tantuğ2014). Translating sentiment lexicons has three main drawbacks:

1. 1. It is a laborious task in terms of human effort, and it is also error-prone.

2. 2. A word expressing positive sentiment in a language may not have the same effect in another language. For example, in various parts of Asia, people may use the word “smile” in the text for covering up embarrassment, humiliation, or shame, which is likely a negative sentiment. In Vietnam, this word is used as a substitute for “I’m sorry” or other behavioral expression patterns (Fontes Reference Fontes2009). Therefore, the word smile cannot be assigned the same sentiment direction and score in Vietnamese as in English, which is a subjective topic.

3. 3. Apart from the cultural aspect, even people speaking the same language may translate words differently. Thus, a word can be labeled as having different sentiments by different translators.

Due to these drawbacks, instead of translating an available sentiment lexicon into Turkish, we develop methods that compute the sentiment strengths of the words automatically. We employ two algorithms, a domain-independent algorithm and a domain-specific algorithm, for this purpose. The first one obtains a general score for a given word without using any domain knowledge. We refer to this method as an unsupervised approach, since it does not make use of any sentiment information. We also build a domain-specific model to observe the effect of different domains on the polarity of some words. We call this a semi-supervised approach, since the seed words are determined using the domain and sentiment information. In the experiments (Section 4.3), we observed that the domain-specific approach outperforms the other approach, as can be expected.

3.3.1 Domain independent

In the domain-independent model, we generate the sentiment score (SC) of a word using the pointwise mutual information (PMI) scheme (Turney Reference Turney2002). Given a word word, the SC is computed as shown below:

(1) \begin{equation}\begin{aligned}SC(word) = \log_2\left(\frac{hits(word\ NEAR\ ``harika\textrm'{\textrm '})}{ hits(``harika{\text '}{\textrm'})} \times \frac{ hits(`berbat\textrm')}{hits(word\ NEAR\ ``berbat{\textrm'}{\textrm '})}\right)\end{aligned}\end{equation}

The words harika (great) and berbat (awful) form an antonym pair determined manually. NEAR is an operator that denotes, in the pattern “ $w_1$ NEAR $w_2$ ,” the cooccurrence of the words $w_1$ and $w_2$ . We use three different operators and patterns in this model as will be explained below. hits(query) returns the number of hits in a search engine given the query.

Equation (1) is obtained by dividing the PMI formula for the pair word and harika (great) by the PMI formula for the pair word and berbat (awful) and then cancelling the hits(word) term in the denominator in the first one and the hits(word) term in the numerator in the second one. In this respect, we calculate the SC of the given word by taking the ratio of the frequency of its cooccurrence with a positive word (e.g., harika (great)) and the frequency of its cooccurrence with the corresponding negative word (e.g., berbat (awful)) and then normalizing with respect to the number of occurrences of this antonym pair. We perform smoothing by adding 0.001 to the hits function to prevent the case of zero occurrences. The higher the score of Equation (1) is, the more probable it expresses a positive sentiment; otherwise, a negative sentiment.

In contrast to other studies in Turkish, we get the hit frequencies from a search engine (YandexFootnote b), instead of using annotated corpora. We analyze the success of the search mechanism using one operator and two collocational patterns. The operator “ $w_1$ NEAR(k) $w_2$ ,” as stated above, returns the number of cooccurrences of the given words within a window of size k. The collocational patterns are “ $w_1$ ve $w_2$ ” (“ $w_1$ and $w_2$ ”), such as “akıllı ve güzel” (“smart and beautiful”), and “hem $w_1$ hem $w_2$ ” (“both $w_1$ and $w_2$ ”), such as “hem cin fikirli hem çalışkan” (“both astute and hardworking”). We use these kinds of conjunctions as operators since they are used in connecting words, phrases, or clauses that have similar semantic or sentiment orientations. For example, it sounds more sensible to say “hardworking and beautiful” rather than “lazy and beautiful”. That is, the conjunction “and” generally connects two words which are of the same polarity.

We observed that the NEAR operator returns more hits and gives rise to better sentiment scores compared to the collocational patterns. We tried out several values for the window size and found the optimal window size as $k = 12$ for the NEAR operator. The optimal value was determined by observing the final performance of the sentiment classifier with word polarity scores obtained with each window size. When k is increased more, expressions with different sentiments tend to occur more. On the other hand, choosing a small window size misses the cooccurrences of the collocated words.

We have manually chosen 10 antonym pairs from most commonly occurring nonstop words, as shown in the first part of Table 3. We decided to use 10 antonym pairs as seed words in accordance with the studies in the literature (e.g., Dehkhargani et al. Reference Dehkhargani, Saygn, Yanıkoğlu and Oflazer2016). The size of the seed set may seem small. However, using antonym words that are most likely indicative of popular and strong sentiments may capture the inherent polarities of corpus words accurately.

Table 3.

Sets of sentimentally antonym pairs chosen manually for the domain independent and the domain-specific approaches

We compute the polarity score of a given word using Equation (1) with respect to each antonym pair and take the average. The reason of using 10 different pairs and their average, instead of a single word pair, is to prevent the bias that could occur toward that single pair. The overall score of a document (review) is obtained by summing the sentiment scores of the words it includes. If the score is greater than zero, it is predicted as a positive review, otherwise as a negative review. We considered only the words with POS label noun, adjective, verb, and adverb in the reviews. We observed in the preliminary experiments that other words, such as conjunctions, do not generally contribute to the overall sentiment expression of the review. This unsupervised approach is summarized in Algorithm 1.

3.3.2 Domain specific

The method given in the previous section assigns a polarity score to a word without taking the domain of the document into account. However, the polarity direction and score of a word may be different in different contexts. For instance, the word “unpredictable’’ expresses a positive sentiment in the movie domain (“unpredictable plot”), whereas it expresses a negative sentiment in car reviews (“unpredictable steering”). To take this into account and to build a domain-specific model, in this work, we have adapted the work of Hamilton et al. (Reference Hamilton, Clark, Leskovec and Jurafsky2016) to Turkish with minor changes. We applied the method to the movie domain and the Twitter dataset, but it can be applied to different domains with slight modifications. In the rest of this section, we explain the method for the movie domain.

As in the domain-independent approach, we choose manually a set of positive and negative word pairs. In this case, however, the words are specific to the movie domain. The list of the antonym word pairs is shown in the second part of Table 3. As can be seen in the table, the seed word sets in the domain-independent and domain-specific cases can overlap. This indicates that some words, such as “güzel” (beautiful) and “çirkin” (ugly), can be considered as generic and specific to a domain at the same time.

Based on the seed words determined manually, we use a propagation algorithm in order to induce a sentiment lexicon for that domain. The idea underlying the algorithm is that two words have similar sentimental meanings if they cooccur frequently or (even if they do not cooccur many times) if their contexts are “similar.” We construct a graph whose nodes correspond to words. Words are connected to each other via links that represent how often they cooccur. The higher the weight of a link is, the closer the two words is.

In order to compute the edge weights, we first build a matrix M which holds the PPMI (positive PMI) scores between all the words in the corpus. For two words $w_i$ and $w_j$ , the value of the matrix entry $\textbf{M}_{i,j}$ is as follows:

(2) \begin{equation} \textbf{M}_{i,j} = {\rm ramp}\left(\log\left(\frac{p(w_{i}, w_{j})}{p(w_{i}) \times p(w_{j})}\right)\right)\\\end{equation}

Here, p(w) denotes the probability of the word w in the corpus, and $p(w_i,w_j)$ denotes the probability of cooccurrence of these two words within a sliding window of size 15. We tried out several values for the window size, which are 10, 15, 20, and 30. The highest success rates were obtained with window size 15. Since the cooccurrence statistics below zero do not make sense, the ramp function converts the negative values to zero. As the matrix is generated, we obtain a vector for each word w, which corresponds to the row for the word w in the matrix. Then the edge weights in the graph are calculated. If we denote the edge matrix as E, then the edge weight $\textbf{E}_{i,j}$ between two words $w_i$ and $w_j$ is simply the cosine similarity between the corresponding word vectors.

As the graph is built, we employ a random walk algorithm to propagate the edge weights within the graph and to calculate the sentiment scores of the words by taking into account both the cooccurrences and the seed words. Let v denote the vocabulary (set of words) in the graph (in the corpus). The method explained below is performed to find the positive polarities and the negative polarities of the words separately. Let $\textbf{P}_P$ and $\textbf{P}_N$ denote the vectors of, respectively, positive and negative polarity scores of the words. An entry in $\textbf{P}_P$ (in $\textbf{P}_N$ ) corresponds to the positive (negative) polarity score of the corresponding word in v. We begin with ${\textbf{P}_P}^{(0)}$ and ${\textbf{P}_N}^{(0)}$ that represent the initial vectors; each entry in ${\textbf{P}_P}^{(0)}$ and ${\textbf{P}_N}^{(0)}$ is initialized with the value $\frac{1}{|\textbf{v}|}$ . Then, we iteratively update the polarity score vector as follows (we explain the process for the positive polarity vector only; the case for negative polarities is analogous):

(3) \begin{equation} {\textbf{P}_P}^{(k+1)} = (1 - g) \textbf{E} {\textbf{P}_P}^{(k)} + g \textbf{s}\end{equation}

In this equation, k denotes the iteration number. s is a (fixed) vector used for the positive seed words, where the positive seed words are assigned a weight of $\frac{1}{|\textbf{s}|}$ and the other words are assigned zero. In this respect, the equation is formed of two components. The matrix E incorporates cooccurrence information, and the vector s is used to bias toward the positive seed words. The contribution of each component is determined by a predefined constant g. Lower values of g favor the propagation of local information (cooccurrence values between neighbor nodes) via the E matrix, whereas higher values of g favor the global information (i.e., the positive seed values) via the s vector.

As the propagation within the graph continues, the scores of the words decrease at each iteration. This indicates that words close to the seed words may have similar scores to those of the seed words. However, words that are far away from the seed words are affected less by the propagation, thereby may have lower scores. To prevent this adverse effect, we steadily increase the local consistency score (i.e., decrease g), which is different than Hamilton et al. (Reference Hamilton, Clark, Leskovec and Jurafsky2016). The intuition behind it is that the seed words we chose may not be the optimal ones and may be misleading to some extent in determining the polarity scores of the words. We keep iterating the algorithm until convergence or a predefined maximum number of iterations (N) is reached.

Then, the positive polarity score vector $\textbf{P}_P$ is computed as follows:

(4) \begin{equation} \textbf{P}_P = \sum_{k=1}^{N} \frac{{\textbf{P}_P}^{(k)}}{k!}\end{equation}

Here, we take into account the vectors formed during the iterations, create a series, and take the sum of the series. At each step k of this sequence, we divide the score of that step by the factorial of k. We prefer the factorial function rather than the exponential decay or some other functions, since we want to weight the words close to the seed words more heavily. We observed in the experiments that using Equation (4) increased the performance by about 1% compared to the formulation in Hamilton et al. (Reference Hamilton, Clark, Leskovec and Jurafsky2016). By using a different formula from that work, we could observe the effect of different propagation coefficients. As stated above, we found out that words far away from the seed words should be weighed less heavily.

Finally, we form the polarity score vector denoted as P. For a word w, the entry in the polarity vector, $\textbf{P}(w)$ , is computed as shown in Equation (5). $\textbf{P}(w)$ being greater than zero indicates that the word has positive polarity, otherwise it has a negative polarity. We used a different formulation in Equation (5) than the one given in Hamilton et al. (Reference Hamilton, Clark, Leskovec and Jurafsky2016), and we observed a small increase in the success rates.

(5) \begin{equation} \textbf{P}(w) = \log\left(\frac{\textbf{P}_P(w)}{\textbf{P}_N(w)}\right)\end{equation}

After the word polarities are found, the score of a document is computed as the sum of the scores of words in the document, as in the domain-independent case. We again considered only the nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. Then the document is predicted as having positive sentiment if the score is greater than zero, and as having negative sentiment otherwise. For example, if the scores of the sentiment words in the sentence (review) given in Table 2 are “çok_güzel” [+3] and “:))” [+2], then the score of the sentence is +5 indicating that it is a review of positive polarity. The summary of the semi-supervised approach is given in Algorithm 2.

3.4 Supervised approaches

We divide the supervised approaches used in this work into two groups. The first one involves the use of classical machine learning algorithms. We developed several novel feature weighting schemes to be used in these methods. The second group consists of deep learning architectures. In this case, we employ much fewer preprocessing and feature extraction operations, since they are handled by these models implicitly.

3.4.1 Traditional machine learning methods and feature sets

In machine learning applications, the choice of the right features and feature values has a more important role on the success rates than the learning approach used. To this effect, we make use of different feature-weighting metrics. The first two are our variations of the delta idf and delta tf-idf metrics as shown in Equations (6) and (7), respectively (Martineau and Finin Reference Martineau and Finin2009). These two scoring metrics are state-of-the-art for the sentiment classification task since they utilize the sentiment and semantic orientation of the words in the training dataset. It outperforms the tf-idf metric as stated in the literature (Martineau and Finin Reference Martineau and Finin2009), as we also observed in this work.

(6) \begin{align} \text{delta idf$_{{w}}$} &=\log\frac{\frac{N_{P,w}}{N_P}+0.001}{\frac{N_{N,w}}{N_N}+0.001} \end{align}

(7) \begin{align} \text{delta tf-idf$_{{w,d}}$} &=\left(0.5 + 0.5 \times \frac{f_{w,d}}{{\rm max}_{\{w' \in d\}}\,f_{w',d}}\right) \times \text{delta idf$_{{w}}$}\end{align}

In Equation (6), delta idf $_{{w}}$ is the sentiment score of the word w in the corpus. $N_P$ and $N_N$ correspond to the number of reviews, respectively, in the positive corpus (i.e., the corpus of positive documents) and in the negative corpus (i.e., the corpus of negative documents). $N_{P,w}$ and $N_{N,w}$ denote the number of reviews in, respectively, the positive corpus and the negative corpus in which the word w occurs. Both the numerator and the denominator are normalized (divided by $N_P$ and $N_N$ ) in order to overcome the imbalance problem between the two classes. We add 0.001 for smoothing. In the machine learning algorithms, the SC delta idf $_{{w}}$ is used as the weight of the word (feature) w, independent of the review.

Equation (7) uses a variation of the tf-idf metric. $f_{w,d}$ denotes the frequency of the word w in document d. We divide this frequency by the frequency of the most frequently occurring word in the document d, denoted by ${\rm max}_{\{w' \in d\}}\,f_{w',d}$ , to prevent a bias toward longer documents. delta tf-idf $_{{w,d}}$ is used in the learning phase as the weight of the word (feature) w in document d.

The third weighting scheme we use is the classical tf-idf metric. The difference from the previous two is that, in this case, we do not make use of the labels of the documents. That is, we compute a tf-idf value for each word in the whole corpus (of both sentiments) and use this value as the feature weight. The next method is using only three features for each review, which are the maximum, minimum, and mean polarity scores computed by Equation (7). As will be seen in Section 4.3, taking into account only these three features proves to be as useful as using the sentiment scores of all the words in a review. As a final scheme, we combine the tf-idf metric with the three-feature scheme. That is, these three features are added to the set of word features with tf-idf scores.

After the feature sets are obtained, we used several classifiers to test the performance. The machine learning algorithms we used are decision tree (J-48), SVM, NB, and k-nearest neighbor (kNN). The literature states that discriminative models generally outperform generative models in sentiment classification (Ng and Jordan Reference Ng and Jordan2002). We also observed this claim to be true, as will be shown in Section 4.3.

Besides the machine learning algorithms, we also implement a simple supervised method, which we name as log scoring (LS). Here, we simply sum the delta tf-idf scores of all the words in a review. If the sum is greater than zero, the review is predicted as positive; otherwise, it is predicted as negative. As will be seen, the performance of this method is nearly as high as the performance of the SVM classifier and it outperforms the kNN method.

3.5 Combination of unsupervised and supervised approaches

The last approach we use is the combination of the unsupervised and supervised methods. If the unsupervised and supervised polarity scores of a word have different signs (one positive, the other negative), we consider that word as ambiguous in terms of polarity and take into account only a fraction of the supervised score. Otherwise, we take the weighted average of the unsupervised and supervised scores, as follows:

(8) \begin{equation} combSC_{w} = \begin{cases} c_{s} \times supervised\_score(w), & \text{if}\ opposite\\&\ \ \ signs \\ c_{u} \times unsupervised\_score(w) + c_{s} \times supervised\_score(w), & \text{otherwise} \end{cases} \end{equation}

Here, the unsupervised score and the supervised score refer to the scores computed in, respectively, Equations (1) and (7). For the supervised case, we chose the delta tf-idf score (Equation (7)), rather than the other weighting metrics, since it yields successful results in the experiments. $c_u$ and $c_s$ denote the coefficients of the unsupervised and supervised scores, respectively, such that $c_u + c_s = 1$ . In order to determine the best values of the coefficients, we first split the dataset into training, development, and test partitions. Then we performed grid search on the development set using nested 10-fold cross-validation, by ranging the coefficients between 0.1 and 0.9 in increments of 0.1. We could also use a supervised regression approach for learning those values. However, our simple approach defining an array of coefficients by grid search was efficient and reliable. We found the optimal values as $c_u = 0.3$ and $c_s = 0.7$ for both datasets. This indicates that the supervised score is more reliable and informative about a word’s polarity, thus it contributes more to the overall score. However, the unsupervised weight also has an effect and ignoring it causes the performance to decrease. When the signs of the unsupervised and supervised polarity scores contradict, we use only the supervised polarity score multiplied by $c_s$ and the unsupervised component is ignored. The reason is that the supervised score is more reliable; however, due to ambiguity, we lessen its impact. After the feature scores are calculated in a combined manner, we feed them into classical machine learning algorithms. As will be seen in Section 4, using the combined approach improves the performance in some cases, especially when we do not perform intensification and negation handling. We give the summary of this approach in Algorithm 4.