An Enhanced Approach to Map Domain-Specific Words in Cross-Domain Sentiment Analysis

Domain adaptation in sentiment analysis is one of the areas where a classifier trained in one domain often classifies sentiments poorly when applied to another domain due to domain-specific words. Extracting features and their relevant opinion words from different domain sources and mapping them to the target domains are herculean tasks as far as domain adaptation is concerned. In this paper, the feature extraction technique is refined by which the mapping task is enhanced. The feature extraction technique uses both the syntactic and semantic properties of the features for extracting similar words. The features are further refined by merging synonyms and by replacing negative polarity terms with the appropriate antonyms. This refinement in the feature selection improves the mapping functionality of the domain adaptation and also exploits the relationship between domain-specific words and domain-independent words from different domains.