A Survey on Feature Extraction Techniques, Classification Methods and Applications of Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

Rapid developments in the era of IoT technologies, coupled with the espousal of social media tools and applications, have promoted the use of data analytics as a means to gain significant insights from unstructured data. Sentiment analysis is an approach that identifies data polarity to classify a text as positive, neutral, or negative. Also referred to as opinion mining or subjective mining, sentiment analysis has applications that range from marketing and customer service to clinical medicine. The application of sentiment analysis in the epoch of big data has proved invaluable in classifying sentiment and, in general, determining opinions from the average person's frame of mind Several sentiment analysis techniques have been developed over the years. In this regard, this article presents a brief survey on the sentiment analysis applications, as well as feature extraction and sentiment classification techniques. This article surveys various feature extractions techniques and concludes that each technique has its own pros and cons, and can be combined for better results. The survey on classification methods suggests that hybrid methods provide finer results than individual ones. The survey of applications surmises that sentiment analysis as applied to different sectors, helps expand business opportunities. Also, the paper presents a few open challenges in carrying out sentiment analysis. HIGHLIGHTS• Surveyed various feature extraction and Classification Techniques that can be used for sentiment analysis.• Surveyed various applications of sentiment analysis.• Surveyed various issues and challenges.