Sentiment visualization and classification via semi-supervised nonlinear dimensionality reduction

• A new method is proposed for efficient sentiment visualization and classification.
• The method utilizes semi-supervised learning to save cost of labeling.
• Visibility and prediction accuracy are improved in spite of reduced features.

Sentiment analysis, which detects the subjectivity or polarity of documents, is one of the fundamental tasks in text data analytics. Recently, the number of documents available online and offline is increasing dramatically, and preprocessed text data have more features. This development makes analysis more complex to be analyzed effectively. This paper proposes a novel semi-supervised Laplacian eigenmap (SS-LE). The SS-LE removes redundant features effectively by decreasing detection errors of sentiments. Moreover, it enables visualization of documents in perceptible low dimensional embedded space to provide a useful tool for text analytics. The proposed method is evaluated using multi-domain review data set in sentiment visualization and classification by comparing other dimensionality reduction methods. SS-LE provides a better similarity measure in the visualization result by separating positive and negative documents properly. Sentiment classification models trained over reduced data by SS-LE show higher accuracy. Overall, experimental results suggest that SS-LE has the potential to be used to visualize documents for the ease of analysis and to train a predictive model in sentiment analysis. SS-LE can also be applied to any other partially annotated text data sets.