WordNet Semantic Relations Based Enhancement of KNN Model for Implicit Aspect Identification in Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

Opinion mining or sentiment analysis (SA) is a key component of real-world applications for e-commerce organizations, manufacturers, and customers. SA deals with the computational evaluation of people’s views, thoughts, and feelings in the text, whether they are visible or concealed. The Aspect based SA level is becoming one of the most active phases in this area. In this paper, we propose an approach to enrich K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) to deal with Implicit Aspect Identification task (IAI). Through the use of WordNet semantic relations, we propose an enhancement for KNN distance computation to support the IAI task. For a conclusive empirical evaluation, experiments are conducted on two datasets of electronic products and restaurant reviews and the effects of our approach are examined and analyzed according to three criteria: KNN distance used to compute the similarity, the number of nearest neighbors (K) and the KNN behavior towards Overfitting and Underfitting. The experimental results show that our approach helps KNN improve its performance and better deal with Overfitting and Underfitting for Implicit Aspect Identification.