Determining Fuzzy Membership for Sentiment Classification: A Three-Layer Sentiment Propagation Model

Enormous quantities of review documents exist in forums, blogs, twitter accounts, and shopping web sites. Analysis of the sentiment information hidden in these review documents is very useful for consumers and manufacturers. The sentiment orientation and sentiment intensity of a review can be described in more detail by using a sentiment score than by using bipolar sentiment polarity. Existing methods for calculating review sentiment scores frequently use a sentiment lexicon or the locations of features in a sentence, a paragraph, and a document. In order to achieve more accurate sentiment scores of review documents, a three-layer sentiment propagation model (TLSPM) is proposed that uses three kinds of interrelations, those among documents, topics, and words. First, we use nine relationship pairwise matrices between documents, topics, and words. In TLSPM, we suppose that sentiment neighbors tend to have the same sentiment polarity and similar sentiment intensity in the sentiment propagation network. Then, we implement the sentiment propagation processes among the documents, topics, and words in turn. Finally, we can obtain the steady sentiment scores of documents by a continuous iteration process. Intuition might suggest that documents with strong sentiment intensity make larger contributions to classification than those with weak sentiment intensity. Therefore, we use the fuzzy membership of documents obtained by TLSPM as the weight of the text to train a fuzzy support vector machine model (FSVM). As compared with a support vector machine (SVM) and four other fuzzy membership determination methods, the results show that FSVM trained with TLSPM can enhance the effectiveness of sentiment classification. In addition, FSVM trained with TLSPM can reduce the mean square error (MSE) on seven sentiment rating prediction data sets.