Evaluation of Approaches for Representation and Sentiment of Customer Reviews

Sammanfattning: Classification of sentiment on customer reviews is a real-world application for many companies that offer text analytics and opinion extraction on customer reviews on different domains such as consumer electronics, hotels, restaurants, and car rental agencies. Natural Language Processing’s latest progress has seen the development of many new state-of-the-art approaches for representing the meaning of sentences, phrases, and words in the text using vector space models, so-called embeddings. In this thesis, we evaluated the most current and most popular text representation techniques against traditional methods as a baseline. The evaluation dataset consists of customer reviews from different domains with different lengths used by a text analysis company. Through a train dataset exploration, we evaluated which datasets were the most suitable for this specific task. Furthermore, we explored different techniques that could be used to alter a language model’s decisions without retraining it. Finally, all the methods were evaluated against their time performance and the resource requirements to present an overall experimental assessment that could potentially help the company decide which is the most appropriate technique to replace its system in a production environment.