KNN classifier based approach for multi-class sentiment analysis of twitter data

Abstract

'Sentiment' literally means 'Emotions'. Sentiment analysis, synonymous to opinion mining, is a type of data mining that refers to the analysis of data obtained from microblogging sites, social media updates, online news reports, user reviews etc., in order to study the sentiments of the people towards an event, organization, product, brand, person etc. In this work, sentiment classification is done into multiple classes. The proposed methodology based on KNN classification algorithm shows an improvement over one of the existing methodologies which is based on SVM classification algorithm. The data used for analysis has been taken from Twitter, this being the most popular microblogging site. The source data has been extracted from Twitter using Python's Tweepy. N-Gram modeling technique has been used for feature extraction and the supervised machine learning algorithm k-nearest neighbor has been used for sentiment classification. The performance of proposed and existing techniques is compared in terms of accuracy, precision and recall. It is analyzed and concluded that the proposed technique performs better in terms of all the standard evaluation parameters.