A hybrid sentiment analysis approach using black widow optimization based feature selection

Abstract

With the massive development of Internet technologies and e-commerce technology, people rely on the product reviews provided by users through web. Sentiment analysis of online reviews has become a mainstream way for businesses on e-commerce platforms to satisfy the customers. This paper proposes a novel hybrid framework with Black Widow Optimization (BWO) based feature reduction technique which combines the merits of both machine learning and lexicon-based approaches to attain better scalability and accuracy. The scalability problem arises due to noisy, irrelevant and unique features present in the extracted features from proposed approach, which can be eliminated by adopting an effective feature reduction technique. In our proposed BWO approach, without changing the accuracy (90%), the feature-set size is reduced up to 43%. The proposed feature selection technique outperforms other commonly used Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Genetic Algorithm (GA) based feature selection techniques with reduced computation time of 21 sec. Moreover, our sentiment analysis approach is analyzed using performance metrics such as precision, recall, F-measure, and computation time. Many organizations can use these online reviews to make well-informed decisions towards the users’ interests and preferences to enhance customer satisfaction, product quality and to find the aspects to improve the products, thereby to generate more profits.