Sentiment analysis techniques in recent works

Sentiment Analysis (SA) task is to label people's opinions as different categories such as positive and negative from a given piece of text. Another task is to decide whether a given text is subjective, expressing the writer's opinions, or objective, expressing. These tasks were performed at different levels of analysis ranging from the document level, to the sentence and phrase level. Another task is aspect extraction which originated from aspect-based sentiment analysis in phrase level. All these tasks are under the umbrella of SA. In recent years a large number of methods, techniques and enhancements have been proposed for the problem of SA in different tasks at different levels. This survey aims to categorize SA techniques in general, without focusing on specific level or task. And also to review the main research problems in recent articles presented in this field. We found that machine learning-based techniques including supervised learning, unsupervised learning and semi-supervised learning techniques, Lexicon-based techniques and hybrid techniques are the most frequent techniques used. The open problems are that recent techniques are still unable to work well in different domain; sentiment classification based on insufficient labeled data is still a challenging problem; there is lack of SA research in languages other than English; and existing techniques are still unable to deal with complex sentences that requires more than sentiment words and simple parsing.