Deepak MurugaianGuest Author

Sentiment Analysis – Demystified (in layman’s terms)

By | Deepak Murugaian | Making Tools for empowering “Teaching As A Business” providers to run successful online business empires!

Let us get the definitions straight first! Sentiment is the attitude of a speaker or a writer towards anything, such as a personality, business, product or even a place. Sentiment analysis is the method of equipping a computer algorithm to determine the writer’s sentiment using Natural Language Processing (NLP).

For example:

Amazing Phone. Don't think, Just Go for it.

- Positive Sentiment

The signal drops very frequently, and voice quality is also bad

- Negative Sentiment

Different methods including statistical techniques are employed to evaluate sentiment. Few depend ultimately on the algorithm itself; Few employ people to interpret it, and others take a hybrid approach.

Also, not always sentiment is about positive or negative, it can go further deep into capturing emotions of the writer (sad, angry, happy, excited, etc.) and this is not easy as you might see in the above examples because, in real-time, the sentences are always lengthy with lot of connections and also it‘s hard to understand the context of an author. (Example: Sarcasm)

“The scope of this article is to give you a glimpse of how a rule-based sentiment engine is built. The idea here is to make a newbie understand the intuition.”To start with, let’s define the goal of this exercise, we will discuss on a rule-based approach based on the logic of how a person will interpret the sentiment of a sentence. A Word of caution here, there are many ways to deal with it, and this is one way to do so.

Let’s take the above examples,

Amazing Phone. Don't think, Just Go for it

Now, If I ask you to determine the sentiment of the above sentence with just an objective answer(Positive | Negative), what will it be?

Obviously, it’s going to be “Positive” without no doubt!

Now let’s drill down the answer further, Let’s split the sentence into individual words,

“Amazing” + “Phone” + “Don't" + “think” + “Just” + “Go” + “for” + “it"

Now, if you notice carefully, the following words do not express any sentiments as a single word alone.

“Phone”, “Don’t", “think”, “Just” ,“Go”,“for”,”it”

But the word “Amazing” alone defines the sentiment “positive.”

Now based on this intuition, if we were to build a small algorithm, all we need is a list of words that we know for sure is positive and the list of words for certain that we are aware that they are negative. For now, forget about how to procure the lists since there are a lot of open source lists already available on the web.

Now that, we have the library of positive and negative words, can we write a simple algorithm to score a sentence into positive or negative?

Step 1: Split a sentence into independent words. W = {1…n }

Step 2: For n = 1 to Number of Words and Initialise sentiment =0

Step 3: If the Current-Word:  W isin positive list 
        then add 1 to sentiment 
        elseif it isin negative list subtract 1 from sentiment 
        orelsedo nothing(if the word isnot present in either 
        of the list, simply add 0)

Now, let’s take the same example and apply the above steps,

Amazing = 1

Phone = 0

Don't = 0

think = 0

Just= 0

Go= 0for= 0

it = 0

So the sentiment = + 1, That is Positive.

I guess this article helped you to understand the intuition behind how an algorithm can determine the sentiment of a sentence. Real world examples are more complex, and this simple rule will not take for enhancers and negations. For example,

- “very good” should be treated differently 
   when compared to “good” and likewise

- "not good" should not be flagged as positive by the algorithm

When we draw in the relationship between words and bring in parts of speech to associate sentiments to multiple objects in the sentence, arriving at the sentiment gets more complicated! But as I said earlier this would be a good starting point for understanding sentiment analysis.

Republished with permission and originally published at Deepak Murugaian’s LinkedIn

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