Sentiment Analysis may be performed as an application of Machine Learning (ML) to large bodies of text, such as those found in large consumer review datasets, in order to determine sentiment (positive, negative, sarcastic, etc.) and gain feedback. The use of Machine Learning techniques in this endeavor allows for much larger quantities of data to be processed than would be practical for human evaluators working directly with the data. With recent advances in Machine Learning in the form of new and powerful frameworks, it is relatively simple to set up a machine to perform analysis on text in a way previously confined to the domain of common-sense, human interpretation of opinions, feelings, etc.
Attribute | Description |
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Summary | Sentiment Analysis – Create and use a neural network model which is capable of inferring positive or negative sentiment from strings of coherent text. |
Topics | File I/O, parsing text, various machine learning topics. |
Audience | Students who are familiar with Python and interested in Machine Learning or Data Science. |
Difficulty | This is an intermediate to advanced assignment distilled into a high-level step-by-step with room to innovate. A student familiar with the frameworks involved may finish in a day or less, while others may need to spend more time researching. A good working knowledge is well-earned and allows intuitive tuning of hyperparameters and potential implementations of more advanced mechanisms (RNNs, LSTMs, etc.) to improve performance. |
Strengths | Introduction to an application of Machine Learning, exercises file input/output, string parsing, working with arrays, and use of third-party frameworks. |
Weaknesses | May be difficult for the student to grasp the inner workings without introduction and overview. In the endeavor of improved performance, heavy reliance on independent research and effort to gain a working knowledge of the concepts involved. |
Dependencies | TensorFlow, Keras deep learning library (included in TensorFlow), and sentiment-labelled dataset(s) (provided). |
Variants | Focus on file I/O, string parsing, and data massaging/preparation. |
Assignment Description | This assignment is meant to be a hands-on example of practical machine-learning applications. |
Structure Description | The assignment is structured as a high-level step-by-step where the student is free to fill in the blanks, but there is functional code and usable data available from the start. |
How It Works Description | The generated neural net model uses special representations of words known as word embeddings to learn how they are related to sentiments indicated during training by adjusting the values in the dimensions of the word embeddings. The model may then be used to infer sentiment from arbitrary text inputs. |
Data used for this assignment may vary, but for a successful attempt at inference on sentiments, datasets which are used should be well curated and have many examples for the neural net model to learn from. Some examples are the IMDb, Amazon, and Yelp reviews datasets. The datasets included in this assignment are a combination of those, which was originally for a paper by Kotzias et. al.
Starter / support code for this assignment is available in the GitHub repository.
Upon successful completion of this assignment, the student’s program should demonstrate reasonable accuracy in determining the sentiment (positive, negative) of a statement similar to those used in the training datasets. Getting far enough to perform any inference at all, whether or not it is accurate, still demonstrates a level of competence in file input/output, string parsing, mapping of one datatype to another using arrays or other data types, use of third-party frameworks, and a reasonable effort. In some cases, all that is necessary to improve performance is the tuning of the neural network model hyperparameters (number of hidden neurons, dimensionality of word embeddings, etc.).
A runnable demo application is available in the GitHub repository.