Machine Learning and Lexicon based Methods for Sentiment Classification: A Survey

Sentiment classification is an important subject in text mining research, which concerns the application of automatic methods for predicting the orientation of sentiment present on text documents, with many applications on a number of areas including recommender and advertising systems, customer intelligence and information retrieval. In this paper, we provide a survey and comparative study of existing techniques for opinion mining including machine learning and lexicon-based approaches, together with evaluation metrics. Also cross-domain and cross-lingual approaches are explored. Experimental results show that supervised machine learning methods, such as SVM and naive Bayes, have higher precision, while lexicon-based methods are also very competitive because they require few effort in human-labeled document and isn't sensitive to the quantity and quality of the training dataset.