Sentiment Analysis and Ontology Engineering

Abstract

Since the inception of the Web 2.0, World Wide Web is widely being used as a platform by customers and manufactures to share experiences and opinions regarding products, services, marketing campaigns, social events, etc. As a result, there is enormous growth in user-generated contents (e.g. customer reviews), providing an opportunity for data analysts to computationally evaluate users’ sentiments and emotions for developing real-life applications for business intelligence, product recommendation, enhanced customer services, and target marketing. Since users’ feedbaks (aka reviews) are very useful for products development and marketing, large business houses and corporates are taking interest in opinion mining and sentiment analysis systems. In this chapter, we propose the design of an Ontology Learning and Sentiment Analysis (OntoLSA) system for ontology learning and sentiment analysis using rule-based and machine learning approaches. The rule-based approach aims to identify candidate concepts, which are analyzed using a customized HITS algorithm to compile a list of feasible concepts. Feasible concepts and their relationships (both structural and non-structural) are used to generate a domain ontology, which is later on used for opinion mining and sentiment analysis. The proposed system is also integrated with a visualization module to facilitate users to navigate through review documents at different levels of granularity using a graphical user interface.