Analysing user sentiment of Indian movie reviews: A probabilistic committee selection model

Abstract

Purpose

To be sustainable and competitive in the current business environment, it is useful to understand users’ sentiment towards products and services. This critical task can be achieved via natural language processing and machine learning classifiers. This paper aims to propose a novel probabilistic committee selection classifier (PCC) to analyse and classify the sentiment polarities of movie reviews.

Design/methodology/approach

An Indian movie review corpus is assembled for this study. Another publicly available movie review polarity corpus is also involved with regard to validating the results. The greedy stepwise search method is used to extract the features/words of the reviews. The performance of the proposed classifier is measured using different metrics, such as F-measure, false positive rate, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and training time. Further, the proposed classifier is compared with other popular machine-learning classifiers, such as Bayesian, Naïve Bayes, Decision Tree (J48), Support Vector Machine and Random Forest.

Findings

The results of this study show that the proposed classifier is good at predicting the positive or negative polarity of movie reviews. Its performance accuracy and the value of the ROC curve of the PCC is found to be the most suitable of all other classifiers tested in this study. This classifier is also found to be efficient at identifying positive sentiments of reviews, where it gives low false positive rates for both the Indian Movie Review and Review Polarity corpora used in this study. The training time of the proposed classifier is found to be slightly higher than that of Bayesian, Naïve Bayes and J48.

Research limitations/implications

Only movie review sentiments written in English are considered. In addition, the proposed committee selection classifier is prepared only using the committee of probabilistic classifiers; however, other classifier committees can also be built, tested and compared with the present experiment scenario.

Practical implications

In this paper, a novel probabilistic approach is proposed and used for classifying movie reviews, and is found to be highly effective in comparison with other state-of-the-art classifiers. This classifier may be tested for different applications and may provide new insights for developers and researchers.

Social implications

The proposed PCC may be used to classify different product reviews, and hence may be beneficial to organizations to justify users’ reviews about specific products or services. By using authentic positive and negative sentiments of users, the credibility of the specific product, service or event may be enhanced. PCC may also be applied to other applications, such as spam detection, blog mining, news mining and various other data-mining applications.

Originality/value

The constructed PCC is novel and was tested on Indian movie review data.

Citation

Trivedi, S.K. and Dey, S. (2018), "Analysing user sentiment of Indian movie reviews: A probabilistic committee selection model", The Electronic Library, Vol. 36 No. 4, pp. 590-606. https://doi.org/10.1108/EL-08-2017-0182