David Smith has a post summarizing sentiment analysis with Microsoft R Server:
Tsuyoshi Matsuzaki demonstrates the process in a post at the MSDN Blog. The post explores the Multi-Domain Sentiment Dataset, a collection of product reviews from Amazon.com. The dataset includes reviews from 975,194 products on Amazon.com from a variety of domains, and for each product there is a text review and a star rating of 1, 2, 4, or 5. (There are no 3-star rated reviews in the data set.) Here’s one example, selected at random:
What a useful reference! I bought this book hoping to brush up on my French after a few years of absence, and found it to be indispensable. It’s great for quickly looking up grammatical rules and structures as well as vocabulary-building using the helpful vocabulary lists throughout the book. My personal favorite feature of this text is Part V, Idiomatic Usage. This section contains extensive lists of idioms, grouped by their root nouns or verbs. Memorizing one or two of these a day will do wonders for your confidence in French. This book is highly recommended either as a standalone text, or, preferably, as a supplement to a more traditional textbook. In either case, it will serve you well in your continuing education in the French language.
The review contains many positive terms (“useful”, “indespensable”, “highly recommended”), and in fact is associated with a 5-star rating for this book. The goal of the blog post was to find the terms most associated with positive (or negative) reviews. One way to do this is to use the
featurizeTextfunction in thje Microsoft ML package included with Microsoft R Client and Microsoft R Server. Among other things, this function can be used to extract ngrams (sequences of one, two, or more words) from arbitrary text. In this example, we extract all of the one and two-word sequences represented at least 500 times in the reviews. Then, to assess which have the most impact on ratings, we use their presence or absence as predictors in a linear model:
If you’re thinking about sentiment analysis, read the whole thing.