Collective Sentiment Classification Based on User Leniency and Product Popularity

We propose a method of collective sentiment classification that assumes dependencies among labels of an input set of reviews. The key observation behind our method is that the distribution of polarity labels over reviews written by each user or written on each product is often skewed in the real world; intolerant users tend to report complaints while popular products are likely to receive praise. We encode these characteristics of users and products (referred to as user leniency and product popularity) by introducing global features in supervised learning. To resolve dependencies among labels of a given set of reviews, we explore two approximated decoding algorithms, “easiest-first decoding” and “twostage decoding”. Experimental results on two real-world datasets with product and user/product information confirmed that our method contributed greatly to the classification accuracy.