The Scalable Fuzzy Inference-Based Ensemble Method for Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

Internet environments such as social networks, news sites, and blogs are the platforms where people can share their ideas and opinions. Many people share their comments instantly on the internet, which results in creating large volumes of entries. It is important for institutions and organizations to analyze this big data in an efficient and rapid manner to produce summary information about the feelings or opinions of individuals. In this study, we propose a scalable framework that makes sentiment classification by evaluating the compound probability scores of the most widely used methods in sentiment analysis through a fuzzy inference mechanism in an ensemble manner. The designed fuzzy inference system makes the sentiment estimation by evaluating the compound scores of valance aware dictionary, word embedding, and count vectorization processes. The difference of the proposed method from the classical ensemble methods is that it allows weighting of base learners and combines the strengths of each algorithm through fuzzy rules. The sentiment estimation process from text data can be managed either as a 2-class (positive and negative) or as a 3-class (positive, neutral, and negative) problem. We performed the experimental work on four available tagged social network data sets for both 2-class and 3-class classifications and observed that the proposed method provides improvements in accuracy.