Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down? Semantic Orientation Applied to Unsupervised Classification of Reviews

2002 arXiv (Cornell University) 1,580 citations

Abstract

This paper presents a simple unsupervised learning algorithm for classifying reviews as recommended (thumbs up) or not recommended (thumbs down). The classification of a review is predicted by the average semantic orientation of the phrases in the review that contain adjectives or adverbs. A phrase has a positive semantic orientation when it has good associations (e.g., "subtle nuances") and a negative semantic orientation when it has bad associations (e.g., "very cavalier"). In this paper, the semantic orientation of a phrase is calculated as the mutual information between the given phrase and the word "excellent" minus the mutual information between the given phrase and the word "poor". A review is classified as recommended if the average semantic orientation of its phrases is positive. The algorithm achieves an average accuracy of 74% when evaluated on 410 reviews from Epinions, sampled from four different domains (reviews of automobiles, banks, movies, and travel destinations). The accuracy ranges from 84% for automobile reviews to 66% for movie reviews.

Keywords

PhraseOrientation (vector space)Natural language processingWord (group theory)Computer scienceArtificial intelligenceLinguisticsMathematics

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Year
2002
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preprint
Citations
1580
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Peter D. Turney (2002). Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down? Semantic Orientation Applied to Unsupervised Classification of Reviews. arXiv (Cornell University) . https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.cs/0212032

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DOI
10.48550/arxiv.cs/0212032