Chinese micro-blog sentiment classification through a novel hybrid learning model

Abstract

With the rising and spreading of micro-blog, the sentiment classification of short texts has become a research hotspot. Some methods have been developed in the past decade. However, since the Chinese and English are different in language syntax, semantics and pragmatics, sentiment classification methods that are effective for English twitter may fail on Chinese micro-blog. In addition, the colloquialism and conciseness of short Chinese texts introduces additional challenges to sentiment classification. In this work, a novel hybrid learning model was proposed for sentiment classification of Chinese micro-blogs, which included two stages. In the first stage, emotional scores were calculated over the whole dataset by utilizing an improved Chinese-oriented sentiment dictionary classification method. Data with extremely high or low scores were directly labeled. In the second stage, the remaining data were labeled by using an integrated classification method based on sentiment dictionary, support vector machine (SVM) and k-nearest neighbor (KNN). An improved feature selection method was adopted to enhance the discriminative power of the selected features. The two-stage hybrid framework made the proposed method effective for sentiment classification of Chinese micro-blogs. Experiments on the COAE2014 (Chinese Opinion Analysis Evaluation 2014) dataset show that the proposed method outperforms other schemes.