A word sense disambiguation method for feature level sentiment analysis

Abstract

Sentiment analysis is an automatic method used to determine that the opinion of a person about a subject is positive or negative. One of the most important tasks in sentiment analysis is to disambiguate the sense of words according to context. Most errors in sentiment analysis are because of improper sense disambiguation. Few methods for this purpose have been proposed in literature. However, they are not able to properly determine the context of word in a sentence. In addition, the lexicon dictionaries used by these methods lack word senses and also do not provide a context matching technique. These issues need to be addressed in order to improve the performance of sentiment analysis so that it can be used by customers and manufacturers for decision making. In this paper, we propose a feature level sentiment analysis system, which produces a summary of opinions about product features. A word sense disambiguation method is introduced which accurately determines the sense of a word within a context while determining the polarity. In addition, a heuristic based method is proposed in order to determine the text where opinion about a product feature is expressed. The results show that the proposed methods achieve better accuracy than existing methods.