An empirical study of sentiment analysis for chinese documents

Up to now, there are very few researches conducted on sentiment classification for Chinese documents. In order to remedy this deficiency, this paper presents an empirical study of sentiment categorization on Chinese documents. Four feature selection methods (MI, IG, CHI and DF) and five learning methods (centroid classifier, K-nearest neighbor, winnow classifier, Naive Bayes and SVM) are investigated on a Chinese sentiment corpus with a size of 1021 documents. The experimental results indicate that IG performs the best for sentimental terms selection and SVM exhibits the best performance for sentiment classification. Furthermore, we found that sentiment classifiers are severely dependent on domains or topics. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.