An Enhanced SVM Model for Implicit Aspect Identification in Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

Opinion Mining or Sentiment Analysis (SA) is a key component of E-commerce applications where a vast number of reviews are generated by customers. SA operates on aspect level where the views are expressed on a specific aspect of a product and have a big influence on the customers’ choices and businesses’ reputation. Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is the task of categorizing text by aspect and identifying the sentiment attributed to it. Implicit Aspect Identification (IAI) is a subtask of ABSA. This paper aims to empirically investigate how external knowledge (e.g. WordNet) is integrated into SVM model to address some of its intrinsic issues when dealing with classification. To achieve this research goal, we propose an approach to improve Support Vector Machines (SVM) model to deal with IAI. Using WordNet (WN) semantic relations, we suggest an enhancement for the SVM kernel computation. Experiments are conducted on three benchmark datasets of products, laptops, and restaurant reviews. The effects of our approach are examined and analyzed according to three criteria: (i) kernel function used, (ii) different experimental settings, and (iii) SVM behavior towards Overfitting and Underfitting. The research finding of our work is that the integration of external knowledge (e.g. WordNet) is experimentally proved to be significantly helpful to SVM classification for IAI and especially for addressing Overfitting and Underfitting that are considered as two of the main structural SVM issues. The empirical results demonstrate that our approach helps SVM (i) improve its performance for the three considered kernels and under different experimental settings, and (ii) deal better with Overfitting and Underfitting.