Document-level sentiment classification: An empirical comparison between SVM and ANN

Document-level sentiment classification aims to automate the task of classifying a textual review, which is given on a single topic, as expressing a positive or negative sentiment. In general, supervised methods consist of two stages: (i) extraction/selection of informative features and (ii) classification of reviews by using learning models like Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Naı¨ve Bayes (NB). SVM have been extensively and successfully used as a sentiment learning approach while Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) have rarely been considered in comparative studies in the sentiment analysis literature. This paper presents an empirical comparison between SVM and ANN regarding document-level sentiment analysis. We discuss requirements, resulting models and contexts in which both approaches achieve better levels of classification accuracy. We adopt a standard evaluation context with popular supervised methods for feature selection and weighting in a traditional bag-of-words model. Except for some unbalanced data contexts, our experiments indicated that ANN produce superior or at least comparable results to SVM’s. Specially on the benchmark dataset of Movies reviews, ANN outperformed SVM by a statistically significant difference, even on the context of unbalanced data. Our results have also confirmed some potential limitations of both models, which have been rarely discussed in the sentiment classification literature, like the computational cost of SVM at the running time and ANN at the training time.

► SVM have been extensively and successfully used as a sentiment learning approach.
► ANN have rarely been considered in sentiment analysis literature.
► Our results shown ANN outperformed SVM on the benchmark dataset of Movies reviews.
► SVM have resulted in a running time that grows faster than the running time of ANN.
► ANN can be a candidate approach when the task involves sentiment learning.