Sentiment analysis : Frequency-based models
First blog post published on my Data Science project for Reputation.com
We give our tenants insights about their online reputation based on their online reviews and ratings. In doing so, one thing we try to do is pull apart the text of reviews to understand what the reviews are dealing with, and tell our clients what their customers are talking about and how happy those customers are with key aspects of our clients’ business.
So for example, we might identify 100 reviews for our client mentioning price, and leveraging the star rating of those reviews, we might discern that 80% of those reviews are positive and the average rating of those reviews is 4.0 stars. However, this method could be improved: a positive review mentioning price is not necessarily positive about price. For example:
The food was awesome, and the service absolutely excellent. The price was very high for a coffee-shop style restaurant.
This 5 star review is obviously negative about the price of the restaurant. We need a model that tells us the local sentiment of a sentence or a subsentence in order to be able to understand what elements drive the rating of the review. I’ll explain some of the techniques we have studied, implemented and benchmarked in order to build our Sentiment Mining Tool.
Naive Bayes Classifier
Naive Bayes is the first and the easiest method to classify sentiment in a text. It’s based on the Bayes formula for conditional probabilities:
We’ll represent a text by a Bag of Words, which is a set of features “the word wappears f times” for each word w in the sentence and f, the frequency of w in the sentence. Assuming the Naive Bayes assumption that these features are independent, this formula helps us deduce the probability that the sentence is positive (A) knowing that w appears f times (B) for every w. In fact, we can deduce from the frequencies in a large enough dataset the probability for a sentence to be positive (A), and the probabilities of every feature and then of their intersection (B). Training the model on a training set of 10,000 annotated sentences, we get a set of informative features that are helpful to predict whether a sentence is positive or negative. Here are the 10 most informative features we get:
This method is the easiest to implement and the big advantage is that it’s completely transparent. When we process it, we know that the classifier found a set of strongly positive or of strongly negative words, and that it is why we classified the sentence in such a way.
How to improve it
However, there are several drawbacks using this method.
First, it fails to identify the neutral class. As a matter of fact, words can have a positive or a negative meaning (“good”, “awesome”, ”horrible”, …) but no word has a neutral connotation. Often, it’s all about the absence of such positively or negatively meaningful words or about the structure of the sentence that reflects the absence of strong emotion. The Bag of Words representation doesn’t address this problem.
It also fails to understand intensity and negations. Comparing “good” and “quite good” for instance, the first one is more likely to appear in a positive sentence than the second one. We tried some methods to address this: adding a list of meaningful bigrams (which mean that we would read “quite good” as a single word for instance), or training the model on bigrams instead of training it on single words, but both didn’t improve our model very much. We also fail to identify negations most of the time, because this model doesn’t take the word order into account.
Most of all, the Naive Bayes model doesn’t perform very well in solving the local sentiment analysis problem. In a long text, having a high frequency of positive words: “sensational”, “tasty”, … makes it very likely that the author is expressing positive sentiment. But as our goal is to determine the local sentiment, we want to process the tool on short sentences and subsentences. (We already have a star rating that tells us the author’s overall sentiment.) We don’t have enough words in the sentence to aggregate so we need to understand very precisely the semantic structure.
The Bag of Words representation is a very bad way to do this. For instance, the sentence “The food could have been more tasty.”, we detect the word “tasty” that is related to a positive feeling, but we don’t understand that “could have been more” is a kind of negation or nuance. Many short sentences are like that, and looking at only a small sentence dataset reduced our accuracy from around 77% to less than 65%.
Rule-based sentiment models
To improve the Naive Bayes methods and make it fit the short sentences sentiment analysis challenge, we added some rules to take into account negations, intensity markers (“more”, “extremely”, “absolutely”, “the most”, …), nuance, and other semantic structures that appear very often near sentimental phrases and change their meanings. For instance, in “The food wasn’t very tasty”, we want to understand that “not very tasty” is less negative than “not tasty” or “not tasty at all”.
We leveraged the results of the Naive Bayes training to build a large vocabulary of positive and negative words. When we process a given sentence, we attribute every word a positive and a negative score, and calculate the overall scores by a precise analysis of the semantical structure based on the open-source library spacy’s pipelines for part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing. We get a metric for positive, negative and neutral scores, the neutral score being defined as the proportion of words that are neither positive nor negative in the sentence. We used a deep-learning technique to deduce from our training set the relation between these scores and the sentiment. Here are the graphs we obtained for negative, neutral and positive sentences:
The model helps us decide very well whether an expressive sentence is positive or negative (we get around 75% accuracy), but struggles understanding a criteria for neutrality or absence of sentiment (on our test-set, it’s wrong 80% of the time). It’s much better than the Naive Bayes, but 75% is less than the state-of-art for positive/negative decision.
