EOSentiMiner: an opinion-aware system based on emotion ontology for sentiment analysis of Chinese online reviews

With the growing availability and popularity of online reviews, consumers' opinions towards certain products or services are generated and spread over the Internet; sentiment analysis thus arises in response to the requirement of opinion seekers. Most prior studies are concerned with statistics-based methods for sentiment classification. These methods, however, suffer from weak comprehension of text-based messages at semantic level, thus resulting in low accuracy. We propose an ontology-based opinion-aware framework - EOSentiMiner - to conduct sentiment analysis for Chinese online reviews from a semantic perspective. The emotion space model is employed to express emotions of reviews in the EOSentiMiner, where sentiment words are classified into two types: emotional words and evaluation words. Furthermore, the former contains eight emotional classes, and the latter is divided into two opinion evaluation classes. An emotion ontology model is then built based on HowNet to express emotion in a fuzzy way. Based on emotion ontology, we evaluate some factors possibly affecting sentiment classification including features of products (services), emotion polarity and intensity, degree words, negative words, rhetoric and punctuation. Finally, sentiment calculation based on emotion ontology is proposed from sentence level to document level. We conduct experiments by using the data from online reviews of cellphone and wedding photography. The result shows the EOSentiMiner outperforms baseline methods in term of accuracy. We also find that emotion expression forms and connection relationship vary across different domains of review corpora.