Improving sentiment analysis of short informal Indonesian product reviews using synonym based feature expansion

Sentiment analysis in short informal texts like product reviews is more challenging. Short texts are sparse, noisy, and lack of context information. Traditional text classification methods may not be suitable for analyzing sentiment of short texts given all those difficulties. A common approach to overcome these problems is to enrich the original texts with additional semantics to make it appear like a large document of text. Then, traditional classification methods can be applied to it. In this study, we developed an automatic sentiment analysis system of short informal Indonesian texts using Naïve Bayes and Synonym Based Feature Expansion. The system consists of three main stages, preprocessing and normalization, features expansion and classification. After preprocessing and normalization, we utilize Kateglo to find some synonyms of every words in original texts and append them. Finally, the text is classified using Naïve Bayes. The experiment shows that the proposed method can improve the performance of sentiment analysis of short informal Indonesian product reviews. The best sentiment classification performance using proposed feature expansion is obtained by accuracy of 98%.The experiment also show that feature expansion will give higher improvement in small number of training data than in the large number of them.