Advancing sentiment classification through a population game model approach

Abstract

Computational Sentiment Analysis involves the automation of human emotion comprehension by categorizing sentiments as positive, negative, or neutral. In the contemporary digital environment, the extensive volume of social media content presents significant challenges for manual analysis, thereby necessitating the development and implementation of automated analytical tools. To address the limitations of existing techniques, which heavily rely on machine learning and extensive dataset pre-training, we propose an innovative unsupervised approach for sentiment classification. This novel methodology is grounded in game theory concepts, particularly the population game model, offering a promising solution by circumventing the need for extensive training procedures. We extract two textual features from review comments, namely context score and emotion score. Leveraging lexicon databases and numeric scores, this cognitive mathematical framework is language-independent. Competitive results are demonstrated across various domains (hotels, restaurants, electronic devices, etc.), and the efficacy of the proposed work is validated in two languages (English and Hindi). The highest accuracy recorded for the English domain dataset is 89%, while electronic Hindi reviews attain an 84% accuracy rate. The proposed model exhibits domain and language independence, validated through statistical analyses confirming the significance of the findings. The framework demonstrates noteworthy rationality and coherence in its outcomes.