Aspect context aware sentiment classification of online consumer reviews

Abstract

Purpose

Aspect based sentiment classification is valuable for providing deeper insight into online consumer reviews (OCR). However, the majority of the previous studies explicitly determine the orientation of aspect related sentiment bearing word and overlook the aspect-context. Therefore, this paper aims to propose an aspect-context aware sentiment classification of OCR for deeper and more accurate insights.

Design/methodology/approach

In the proposed methodology, first, aspect descriptions and sentiment bearing words are extracted. Then, the skip-gram model is used to extract the first set of features to capture contextual information. For the second category of features, cosine similarity is used between a pre-defined seed word list and aspects, to capture aspect context sensitive sentiments. The third set of features includes weighted word vectors using term frequency-inverse document frequency. After concatenating features, ensemble classifier is used using three base classifiers.

Findings

Experimental results on two real-world data sets with variable lengths, acquired from Amazon.com and TripAdvisor.com, show that the advised ensemble approach significantly outperforms sentiment classification accuracy of state-of-the-art and baseline methods.

Originality/value

This method is capable of capturing the correct sentiment of ambiguous words and other special words by extracting aspect-context using word vector similarity instead of expensive lexical resources, and hence, shows superior performance in terms of accuracy as compared to other methods.

Citation

Bansal, B. and Srivastava, S. (2020), "Aspect context aware sentiment classification of online consumer reviews", Information Discovery and Delivery, Vol. 48 No. 3, pp. 117-128. https://doi.org/10.1108/IDD-12-2019-0089