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Saif, Hassan; Fernández, Miriam; He, Yulan and Alani, Harith
(2014).
URL: http://lrec2014.lrec-conf.org/en/
Abstract
Sentiment classification over Twitter is usually affected by the noisy nature (abbreviations, irregular forms) of tweets data. A popular procedure to reduce the noise of textual data is to remove stopwords by using pre-compiled stopword lists or more sophisticated methods for dynamic stopword identification. However, the effectiveness of removing stopwords in the context of Twitter sentiment classification has been debated in the last few years. In this paper we investigate whether removing stopwords helps or hampers the effectiveness of Twitter sentiment classification methods. To this end, we apply six different stopword identification methods to Twitter data from six different datasets and observe how removing stopwords affects two well-known supervised sentiment classification methods. We assess the impact of removing stopwords by observing fluctuations on the level of data sparsity, the size of the classifier’s feature space and its classification performance. Our results show that using pre-compiled lists of stopwords negatively impacts the performance of Twitter sentiment classification approaches. On the other hand, the dynamic generation of stopword lists, by removing those infrequent terms appearing only once in the corpus, appears to be the optimal method to maintaining a high classification performance while reducing the data sparsity and substantially shrinking the feature space.
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About
- Item ORO ID
- 40666
- Item Type
- Conference or Workshop Item
- ISBN
- 2-9517408-8-3, 978-2-9517408-8-4
- Project Funding Details
-
Funded Project Name Project ID Funding Body EU-FP7 project SENSE4US Grant no. 611242 EU - Keywords
- sentiment analysis; stopwords; data sparsity
- Academic Unit or School
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Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) > Knowledge Media Institute (KMi)
Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) - Research Group
- Centre for Research in Computing (CRC)
- Copyright Holders
- © 2014 European Language Resources Association
- Depositing User
- Kay Dave