NLP based sentiment analysis on Twitter data using ensemble classifiers

Most sentiment analysis systems use bag-of-words approach for mining sentiments from the online reviews and social media data. Rather considering the whole sentence/ paragraph for analysis, the bag-of-words approach considers only individual words and their count as the feature vectors. This may mislead the classification algorithm especially when used for problems like sentiment classification. Traditional machine learning algorithms like Naive Bayes, Maximum Entropy, SVM etc. are widely used to solve the classification problems. These machine learning algorithms often suffer from biasness towards a particular class. In this paper, we propose Natural Language (NLP) based approach to enhance the sentiment classification by adding semantics in feature vectors and thereby using ensemble methods for classification. Adding semantically similar words and context-sense identities to the feature vectors will increase the accuracy of prediction. Experiments conducted demonstrate that the semantics based feature vector with ensemble classifier outperforms the traditional bag-of-words approach with single machine learning classifier by 3–5%.