Sentiment Analysis of Polarity in Product Reviews

In Social Media
Hafsa Dar Ikram Ullah Lali
Marium Nafees
Dept. of Software Engineering Dept. of Computer Science
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Gujrat University of Gujrat
University of Sargodha
Gujrat, Pakistan Gujrat, Pakistan
Sargodha, Pakistan
hafsa.dar@uog.edu.pk
mariumnafees15@gmail.com ikramullah@uog.edu.pk

Salman Tiwana
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Sargodha
Sargodha, Pakistan
Salmantiwana@ymail.edu.pk

Abstract— Sentiment analysis is the study area in Natural
language processing (NLP) that is concerned to identify the
mood or opinion with in the text. This paper emphasizes on the
different methods utilized for classifying the natural language
text reviews in accordance with opinions expressed in text to
analyze whether the extensive behavior is negative, positive or
neutral. The abundance of discussion platforms, Weblogs,
product reviews sites, e-commerce and social networking sites
have encouraged stream of thoughts and articulation of
opinions. Social media is considered to be a big platform of
sentiments, reviews and opinion evaluation. Data used in this
study are online product reviews collected from twitter and
used to rank the best classifier for sentiments. The method of
analysis on polarity classification was discussed in
experimental work by using well known classifiers including
Naïve byes, Support vector machine and Logistic regression for
predicting the user reviews.
Keywords— Sentiment analysis; Sentiment polarity
classification; Product reviews; Weka; Machine learning
I. INTRODUCTION
The media convergence has extended the utilization of web
that brought forth online networking called social media.
Web-based social networking, an idea that has given
individuals a universal platform for distribution their news,
perspectives and opinions with respect to the incidents
around them. Web-based social networking is expanded in
nearness and imperative in the society. Social sites enable
clients to speak with individuals in the system by sharing
Ideas, graphics, status, posts and items. It has turned out to
be one of the vast platform to express user opinions [1].
Social media considered gold mine to understand the value
of public sentiment. Social Media known as the Internet-
build applications that engaged in taking after the web 2.0
ideological and innovative establishment and let the client in
prompt trading [2].
The information in the way of blogs and discussions on
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other web-based social
networking channels has given consumers another method
for communicating their opinion related to any product and
services, therefore may influence other potential purchasers.
Measuring client’s behavior about any items or services on
social sites is described as sentiment analysis [3]. Sentiment
analysis joins NLP with artificial intelligence for the
evaluation of statements of text analytics posts on different
social platforms in order to determine the polarity of
reviews regarding a specific product and service. The
performance of sentiment analysis can be done at three main
levels: 1) the sentence-level, 2) concept-level and 3)
document level and the methodologies used to examine
sentiments are classified in the main categories are lexicon
based, machine learning and hybrid approaches.
Text and emoticons are used to express the individual
feelings, which are share on the Internet. The ideas which
people shares may mirror a notion with various power in
regards to a particular topic, communicating positive,
negative or even unbiased feelings [4]. In this manner, the
ideas posted on social sites and web blogs are consider to be
helpful for understanding the opinion that people share
about service providers in favor of improvement product
and maintenance [5]. Keeping in mind the end goal to
perceive clients' emotions, the huge information that is
collected from social media must be proceed properly.
Sentiment analysis becomes the answer of this need.
Sentiment analysis is a broad platform of NLP and text
mining. The goal of sentiment analysis is to analyze the text
polarity of natural language [6]. Micro-blogging like twitter
furnish analysts with an abundance of data to communicate
on social network. The common method to communicate is
Microblog posts like tweets that frequently shows the
authors ideas and states of emotions [7].
Twitter is famous social and microblogging administration
that empowers its applicant to post content acceptable 140
characters, called "tweets". The administration launched on
July 2006 [8]. The overall ambiguity was increased rapidly,
with 140 million dynamic applicants begins at 2012
generating tweets of 340 million a day along with 1.6 billion
pursuit questions are handled. Tweets are the essential
nuclear building piece for goodness' sake twitter.
Tweets are otherwise called "status”. Tweets can be
installed, answered to, erased, liked and disliked [9].
The twitter information turns out to be exceptionally famous
as a data source in the research development and
applications in different domains because of its use by huge
community. Market investigation is one of the areas where
data from twitter is broadly utilized as a part of request to
give approach to create business. Researchers have utilized
twitter to anticipate the achievement of the online services
and products and distinguish potential clients who take after
to get the information related to products [10]. The research
of data mining has effectively formed various tools,
techniques and algorithms for manipulate large data to
handled problems of real world. The data mining case
objectives are to successfully deal with huge scale data,
patterns and increase insightful learning [11]. Big Data is
fundamentally used to portray the exponential development
and in addition the accessibility of organized and
unstructured information. It enables connections as far as
deciding business patterns and nature of research. Big data
working is complex due to multiple resources. In this
research, large data is organized by considering big data
applications and dependencies.
Social media is growing rapidly that’s way examine social
data plays a vital role in analyzing customer behavior. So
there we analyzed data of twitter utilizing sentiment analysis
which find the polarity of customer reviews on selected
products. Figure 1 elaborate how process is analyzed by
social media on collected dataset. The products of five
famous companies are selected for data collection that
include 1. Unilever 2. Procter & Gamble 3. Samsung 4.
GlaxoSmithKline and 5. Mobilink:
Figure 1 Social media process analysis
In this research document-level approach is used for the
analysis of sentiments. In proposed work data is collected
from social website twitter and efficiently execute sentiment
analysis of product reviews. The focus of work was to find
the polarity of selected data by applying sentiment analysis.
The two main steps are applied for sentiment analysis are 1)
Text classification and 2) Emoticon Classification. The
sentiment of product reviews is analyzing by using well
trained Machine Learning classifiers that are Naïve Byes
(NB), Support Vector machine (SVM) and Logistic
Regression (LR). The results described that using hybrid
based information of text and emoticons is classified as
positive, negative and neutrals.
In summary, the work contribution is of four-fold:
1. Data collection by using twitter API
2. An analysis the text and emoticons classification of
tweets data
3. Find the polarity distribution by applying sentiment
analysis
4. Find the accuracy of respective analysis
.
II. SENTTIMENT ANALYSIS
“Thinking of people” always be an important information
part for everyone especially in decision-making. Sentiment
analysis is used to identify the polarity of data by using
natural language processing. It also defines as opinion
mining because it analyses the opinion or attitude of a user.
The approach of sentiment analysis is to analyses how user
thinks related particular topics. This helps to determining
the overall contextual polarity of document and sentiments
on different levels. It categories the whole document and
also determine the response of user words or expressions in
the entire document. Many companies use sentiment
analysis in order to observe their status of product and
services in general.
Sentiments can be depicted as emoticons, opinions or ideas
incited or hued by emoticons [12]. Sentiment analysis is the
real task of NLP that examines the individual’s sentiments,
attitudes or feelings towards certain elements. It is the
inspection of using a machine to choose the polarity of an
appraisal whether it is positive, negative, or neutral [13].
Sentiment Analysis used to analyze the data polarity and
access the positive and negative content of the input text.
Figure 2 describe how this analysis help to analyze human
ideas.

Figure 2 Sentiment analysis measurement areas
Machine learning is used to analyze the sentiments and
solutions includes supervised learning utilizing labelled
trained data set, unsupervised learning without trained
labelled data set and semi-supervised with mixed of labelled
and unlabeled data set [14].
III. RELATED WORK
For the advancement of E-commerce and social media
application classification of online reviews are much
important. The aim of sentiment analysis is to determine the
people intention toward a particular product. The two main
task that are involved in data mining from customer reviews
are 1. Classification of data feature set and 2. Sentiment
analysis of customer reviews based on the classification of
data set.
Here the focused of author was using three method of ML
that’s include NB, SVM and maximum entropy
classification that are applied on data collected from movies
dataset rating, that is classified into three categories positive,
negative and neutral. Standard Bag feature framework was
used for this and SVM is considered best as compared to
others [15]. A novel based strategy of ML was applied by
Pang & Lee on trials that’s include motion picture surveys
classified as positive or negative. To assemble subjective
sentences or expressions, 5000 reviews of movie are
collected from (www. rottentomatoes.com) and from the
dataset of web film (imdb.com). Naïve Bayes classifier and
SVM used on subjectivity and after that utilized
fundamental subjective identifier. Author locate the
improvement NB: 86.4%, VS 85.2%, SVM 86.15%, versus
85.45% [16]. Asur & Huberman presented a model to
calculate the expected incomes from movie by evaluate the
social media platform data [17].
A lexicon base structure is used for the sentiment analysis
on the movie reviews dataset and 59.5% fairly based
precision result was calculated [18]. A lexicon-based
analysis was performed by [19] on 2080 tweets data with
emoticon containing data. Polarity accuracy of emoticon
based or without emoticon was calculated as 22% to 94%
while on sentence level 59% accuracy was considered. A
Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) was proposed by [20] to
examine the framework of why type Question Answering
System (QAS) on product data reviews. As a result, it is
certified that MPQA Lexicon and SentiWordnet are
considered to be efficient.
A key issue was handled by [1] on sentiment analysis and
polarity classification. Data is collected from amazon.com
which is one of the famous social site. Related data
contained reviews of four classes of products: beauty,
books, electronic and home. The online survey was done by
3.2million customers towards 20062 product items. Every
review classified as 1) reviewer ID 2) product ID 3) rating
4) view time 5) helpfulness and 6) text. For the analysis of
sentence-level and review-level SVM and NB models were
introduced. An approach of polarity determination was
achieved by [22] using Emoticon-graph by developing a
code in C++ using QT creator. As a result, it is concluded
that emoticon-graphs had preference over conventional
graphs because of easy polarity measurements.
IV. METHODOLOGY
Twitter is one of the biggest Social Networking Services
(SNS) and microblogging administration that empowers its
applicant to post content acceptable 140 characters, called
"tweets". The administration launched on July 2006 [8].
Tweets can be installed, deleted, response to, likes and
dislikes [9]. Twitter is one of the famous or broadly used
platform because of its limited length of tweets. Machine
learning is one of the competent methodology in sentiment
analysis for polarity identification. For the analysis of
sentiments, the text-level sentence classification is executed
by following means: Pre-handling, labelling, classification
and tokenization.
The proposed methodology contains of stages 1: data
collection with labelling 2: data mining and 3: sentiment
analysis. Figure 4 elaborate the proposed methodology of
this research in which all stages are described. Text and
emoticons are used to analyses the effectiveness of results.
Data mining strategies are used for classification of results.
Weka data mining performing tool is used for the analysis
of results. It is a well-known workbench that allow the
researchers simple access to state-of the- art methods in ML
[22]. In this research work Support vector machine (SVM),
Naïve byes (NB) and Logistic Regression (LR) classifiers
are used for the analysis of results.
A. Data Collection
Collection of data contain tweets of five famous products of
different categories which are selected for this research
namely 1: Unilever 2: Samsung 3: Procter and Gamble
(P&G) 4: Mobilink and 5: GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). Table I
highlights the selected products with corresponding
collected number of tweets [23]. Data is collected in the
period of January to April 2017 by using twitter steaming
API and twitter search. This API conveys tweets based on
specific user request along with data about the author,
continuously in real time and author's permission is not
necessary for tweets [27].
TABLE I: TOTAL TWEETS COLLECTED FROM SELECTED
PRODUCTS TABLE II INFORMATION ABOUT TWEETS WITH POLARITY AND
ATTRIBUTES
Products No. of tweets
Samsung 16k Products Tweets Polarity Classification No. of
Unilever 11.8k
Procter & Gamble (P & G) 2.6k Positive Negative Neutral Attributes
Mobilink 6.7k Samsung 16087 6779 1524 7784 1806
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) 5.4k Unilever 11804 8723 1399 1682 2245
P&G 2632 1651 110 871 3320
Mobilink 6671 3220 513 2938 2635
B. Data Labelling and Pre-processing GSK 5428 3115 316 1997 2794

WEKA is an open source under GNU (General Public

License) implementing interface of contains many built-in
functions. In ML and mining, Weka is identified a landmark
system [24]. Figure 3 shows the preprocessing module in
which data is prepare for testing and training by applying all
these for pre-processing, Weka include associations rules,
classification, visualization clustering and regression [28].
In labelling data is labelled by applying hybrid approach of
text and emoticons and is categorized as 1 for positive, 0 for
negative and 2 for neutral that distinguish the polarity
measurements. In table II, Total number of tweets of
selected products and their polarity classification along with
attributes are described. Polarity is classified in positive,
negative and neutral.
C. Learning Algorithms
Although all algorithms have their own advantages and
disadvantages. The algorithms which are selected for this
research are SVM, NB and LR. Naïve byes are generally
executed for analyzing sentiment because of its efficiency. It
contained independence of predicator assumptions and
useful for large dataset. The text is allocated to the highest
probability class.
For text classification SVM algorithm is considered to be
best algorithm because of robust and systematic learning
algorithm in the scenario of large feature space. This
classifier has low interpretability because of dot product
calculation and normalization [25] [29]. LR technique is
coming up from statistic field with probability function for
binary classification and multi classification. In this
research, we have used this for polarity classification. Three
evaluation measure (Precision, Recall and F-measure) are
used to evaluate the performance efficiency of SVM, NB
and LR.

Precision (P) is measured as the number of true positives

(Tp) over the number of true positives plus the number of
false positives (Fp).
The relationship of precision with all classifier is of
exactness. It is measured as number of irrelevant records
retrieved and the number of relevant records are retrieved.
Figure 3 Data preprocessing module

Figure 4 Proposed methodology flowchart

Recall (R) is measured as the number of true positives (Tp) over
the number of true positives plus the number of false negatives
(Fn). It is calculated as total number of relevant records not
retrieved and total number of relevant records are retrieved. The
relationship between both precision and recall is found to be
inverse [26]. F-measure is calculated by identifying the
harmonic mean between recall and precision. In unequal data
distribution precision & recall are good measurements metrics
when contrasted with others to mass the classifiers execution
[30].

In the intense circumstances, when recall approach 100%, yet

precision will be low then F-measure considered as best
evaluation metric. In table III the average results of data for
three evaluation measure of SVM, NB and LR classifiers are
described. These results are calculated on preprocessed dataset
after applying all classifiers separately.
Figure 5 Collective result of all classifiers

TABLE III AVERAGE OF THREE EVALUATION MEASURES FOR

SVM, NB & LR

Evaluation Measures In ending results the overall accuracy of all applied

Classifiers algorithms is prescribed.
Finally, it is easily evaluated by us that although all
Precision Recall F-measure
algorithms classifiers are good in order to determine the
sentiment analysis but SVM is an efficient approach to get
SVM 73.34% 72.2% 72.76% the maximum accuracy of polarity distribution in sentiment
analysis. Figure 6 shows the cumulative accuracy results in
NB 55.4% 56.8% 56% order to make it more precise which algorithm is giving best
accuracy outcomes in which SVM accuracy of 71.8% is
LR 66.72% 63% 64.80% presented by blue color, NB with 56.4% accuracy is
presented by orange color and LR with 62.4% accuracy is
shown by grey color.

V. EXPERIIMENTAL SETUP AND DISCUSSION

There are different tools that are used to measure the

sentiment analysis. WEKA [25] an open source tool is
preferred for this research for dataset classification analysis.
Its aims to give to researchers a complete collection of
machine learning algorithms and data pre-processing tools.
It’s able to allow users to quickly compare and try different
ML methods on data.

We had training corpus of 42,622 reviews and all were

manually annotated with polarity. For training and testing
data file is converted into Attribute-Relation File Format
(ARFF) because Weka accept the file in this format. Data is
classified into three classes of polarity according to nature of Figure 6 Cumulative analysis result
tweets as 1 for positive, 0 for negative and 2 for neutral. In
Weka pre-processing tools are known as filters. For pre-
processing data is converted into StringToWordVctor and
applied un-supervised learning to get the sentiments polarity VI. CONCLUSION
for using proposed algorithms.
In this article, collected tweets from product reviews
After pre-processing experiments are performed on are analyzed and modelled with two approaches: 1)
following classifiers 1: Support vector machine (SVM) 2: text-based and 2) emoticon based. Well known
Naïve byes (NB) 3: Logistic regression (LR). Figure 5 classifiers SVM, NB and LR are trained in WEKA to
shows the graphical representation of all applied algorithms. measure the effectiveness of data. Tweets are
The resulted data help to find the best algorithm for polarity categorized to find the polarity analysis on data. After
classification sentiments. workout of applying different classifiers on data review
SVM is considered an efficient and best because of its
maximum accuracy outcomes.
In future we plan to identify the reviews along with images
from different social networking data and determining the
comparative of these. The data of different social sites would
be a kind measure in order to get more accuracy by applying
more competitive algorithms.
REFERENCES
1. Rekha, K. S. (2014). Opinion Mining and Classification of User Reviews
in Social Media. International Journal, 2.
2. Kaplan, A. M., & Haenlein, M. (2010). Users of the world, unite! The
challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business horizons, 53, 59-
68.
3. Arora, D., Li, K. F., & Neville, S. W. (2015). Consumer’s sentiment́
analysis of popular phone brands and operating system preference using
Twitter data: A feasibility study. Advanced Information Networking and
Applications (AINA), 2015 IEEE 29th International Conference on, (pp.
680-686).
4. Hogenboom, A., Bal, D., Frasincar, F., Bal, M., de Jong, F., & Kaymak,
U. (2013). Exploiting emoticons in sentiment analysis. Proceedings of the
28th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, (pp. 703-710).
6. Guimarães, R., Rodr\́iguez, D. Z., Rosa, R. L., & Bressan, G. (2016).
Recommendation system using sentiment analysis considering the polarity
of the adverb. Consumer Electronics (ISCE), 2016 IEEE International
Symposium on, (pp. 71-72).
7. Roberts, K., Roach, M. A., Johnson, J., Guthrie, J., & Harabagiu, S. M.
(2012). EmpaTweet: Annotating and Detecting Emotions on Twitter.
LREC, 12, pp. 3806-3813.
8. Pak, A., & Paroubek, P. (2010). Twitter as a Corpus for Sentiment
Analysis and Opinion Mining. LREc, 10
9. Duncan, B., & Zhang, Y. (2015). Neural networks for sentiment analysis
on twitter. Cognitive Informatics \& Cognitive Computing (ICCI* CC),
2015 IEEE 14th International Conference on, (pp. 275-278).
10. Lavanya, T., Miraclin Joyce Pamila, J. C., & Veningston, K. (2016).
Online review analytics using word alignment model on Twitter data.
Advanced Computing and Communication Systems (ICACCS), 2016 3rd
International Conference on, 1, pp. 1-6.
11. Jeyapriya, A., & Selvi, C. S. (2015). Extracting aspects and mining
opinions in product reviews using supervised learning algorithm.
Electronics and Communication Systems (ICECS), 2015 2nd International
Conference on, (pp. 548-552).
12. Bhardwaj, N., Shukla, A., & Swarnakar, P. (2014). Users' Sentiment
Analysis in Social Media Context using Natural Language Processing. The
International Conference on Digital Information, Networking, and Wireless
Communications (DINWC), (pp. 103).
13. Mukherjee, S., & Bhattacharyya, P. (2012). Feature specific sentiment
analysis for product reviews. Computational Linguistics and Intelligent
Text Processing, 475-487.
14. Ahmed, K., El Tazi, N., & Hossny, A. H. (2015). Sentiment Analysis
over Social Networks: An Overview. Systems, Man, and Cybernetics
(SMC), 2015 IEEE International Conference on, (pp. 2174-2179).
15. Das, T. K., Acharjya, D. P., & Patra, M. R. (2014). Opinion mining
about a product by analyzing public tweets in Twitter. Computer
Communication and Informatics (ICCCI), 2014 International Conference
on, (pp. 1-4).
7. Pang, B., Lee, L., & Vaithyanathan, S. (2002). Thumbs up?:
sentiment classification using machine learning techniques.
Proceedings of the ACL- Conference on Empirical methods in
natural language processing-Volume 10, (pp. 79-86).
17. Turney, P. D. (2002). Thumbs up or thumbs down?: semantic
orientation applied to unsupervised classification of reviews.
Proceedings of the 40th annual meeting on association for
computational linguistics, (pp. 417-424).
18. Pang, B., & Lee, L. (2004). A sentimental education: Sentiment
analysis using subjectivity summarization based on minimum cuts.
Proceedings of the 42nd annual meeting on Association for
Computational Linguistics, (pp. 271).
19. Lakkaraju, H., Bhattacharyya, C., Bhattacharya, I., & Merugu, S.
(2011). Exploiting coherence for the simultaneous discovery of latent
facets and associated sentiments. Proceedings of the 2011 SIAM
international conference on data mining, (pp. 498-509).
20. Mostafa, M. M. (2013). More than words: Social networks’ text
mining for consumer brand sentiments. Expert Systems with
Applications, 40, 4241-4251.
21. Mishra, A., & Jain, S. K. (2014). An Approach for Computing
Sentiment Polarity Analysis of Complex Why-type Questions on
Product Review Sites. Research in Computing Science, (pp.84, 65-
76).
22. Lovins, J. B. (1968). Development of a stemming algorithm.
Mech. Translat. & Comp. Linguistics, 11, (pp.22-31).
23. Tao, K., Abel, F., Hauff, C., & Houben, G.-J. (2012). What
makes a tweet relevant for a topic? , (pp. 49-56).
24. Kherwa, P., Sachdeva, A., Mahajan, D., Pande, N., &
Singh, P. K. (2014). An approach towards comprehensive sentimental
data analysis and opinion mining. Advance Computing Conference
(IACC), 2014 IEEE International, (pp. 606-612).
25. Holmes, G., Donkin, A., & Witten, I. H. (1994). Weka: A
machine learning workbench. Intelligent Information Systems, 1994.
Proceedings of the 1994 Second Australian and New Zealand
Conference on, (pp. 357-361).
26. Bravo-Marquez, F., Frank, E., Mohammad, S. M., & Pfahringer,
B. (2016). Determining Word-Emotion Associations from Tweets by
Multi-label Classification. Web Intelligence (WI), 2016
IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on, (pp. 536-539).
27. M. Saqib, M. Bilal, M. Ikram et. al., (2017), Effectiveness of
Social Media Data in Healthcare Communication, J. Med.
Imaging Health Inf. Vol. 7, issue 6, pp. 1365-1371
28. Basit S., M. Ikram et al., (2017), Discovery and Classification of
User Interests on Social Media, Information Discovery and
Delivery, vol. 45
29. Raza M., Saqib N., Basit S., Javed F., et al., (2017) Early
Detection of Controversial Urdu Speeches from Social Media, Data
Science and Pattern recognition, Vol 1 (2), pp. 26-42
30. M. Salman, Farooq J., Ikram Ullah, et al., (2018), Comparative
Analysis of Context based Classification of Twitter, 4th IEEE Int.
Conference on Advances in Computing, Communication and
Automation, Malaysia