Exploiting New Sentiment-Based Meta-level Features for Effective Sentiment Analysis

In this paper we address the problem of automatically learning to classify the sentiment of short messages/reviews by exploiting information derived from meta-level features i.e., features derived primarily from the original bag-of-words representation. We propose new meta-level features especially designed for the sentiment analysis of short messages such as: (i) information derived from the sentiment distribution among the k nearest neighbors of a given short test document x, (ii) the distribution of distances of x to their neighbors and (iii) the document polarity of these neighbors given by unsupervised lexical-based methods. Our approach is also capable of exploiting information from the neighborhood of document x regarding (highly noisy) data obtained from 1.6 million Twitter messages with emoticons. The set of proposed features is capable of transforming the original feature space into a new one, potentially smaller and more informed. Experiments performed with a substantial number of datasets (nineteen) demonstrate that the effectiveness of the proposed sentiment-based meta-level features is not only superior to the traditional bag-of-word representation (by up to 16%) but is also superior in most cases to state-of art meta-level features previously proposed in the literature for text classification tasks that do not take into account some idiosyncrasies of sentiment analysis. Our proposal is also largely superior to the best lexicon-based methods as well as to supervised combinations of them. In fact, the proposed approach is the only one to produce the best results in all tested datasets in all scenarios.