Multi-layer text classification with voting for consumer reviews
Yan Feng Zhu, Melody Moh, Teng-Sheng Moh · 2016
As social media has become increasingly popular in the modern world, people are using these platforms to express their opinions about products, businesses, and services. The need for categorizing these consumer reviews has been prominent. One effective solution is sentiment analysis (SA), which has been an active research topic. The goal of SA is to automatically extracting and classifying user opinions. Pervious research works however have not shown satisfied results. In this paper, a multilayer architecture is proposed to increase the performance of multiclass classification. The framework includes data-preprocessing, feature extraction and selection, and classifier building. The framework is a two-layer classification, choosing from Naïve Bayes, Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, and Logistic Regression as base models, and using a voting scheme to obtain the final predicted class. The proposed model is applied to more than 1.3 million restaurant reviews from the Yelp Challenge dataset. We have achieved a high accuracy of 86% for cross validation, and using real-world online review data as test data, we have achieved an accuracy of 80%. The results show that the proposed framework has greatly improved classification accuracy while comparing with those using single-layer architectures. We believe that the proposed method may be applied to, and would have significant contributions to other areas of opinion mining.