How Does Sentiment Analysis with Machine Learning Work?

There are a number of techniques and complex algorithms used to command and train machines to perform sentiment analysis. There are pros and cons to each. But, used together, they can provide exceptional results. Below are some of the most used algorithms

But why do we need sentiment analysis?

Sentiment analysis serves as a fundamental aspect of dealing with customers on online portals and websites for the companies. They do this all the time to classify a comment as a query, complaint, suggestion, opinion, or just love for a product. This way they can easily sort through the comments or questions and prioritize what they need to handle first and even order them in a way that looks better. Companies sometimes even try to delete content that has a negative sentiment attached to it.

How does sentiment analysis work?

NLP or natural language processing is the basic concept on which sentiment analysis is built upon. Natural language processing is a superclass of sentiment analysis that deals with understanding all kinds of things from a piece of text.

NLP is the branch of AI dealing with texts, giving machines the ability to understand and derive from the text. For tasks such as virtual assistant, query solving, creating and maintaining human-like conversations, summarizing texts, spam detection, sentiment analysis, etc. it includes everything from counting the number of words to a machine writing a story, indistinguishable from human texts.

Sentiment analysis can be classified into various categories based on various criteria. Depending upon the scope it can be classified into document-level sentiment analysis, sentence level sentiment analysis, and sub sentence level or phrase level sentiment analysis.

Based on what needs to be done and what kind of data we need to work with there are two major methods of tackling this problem.

• Matching rules based sentiment analysis: There is a predefined list of words for each type of sentiment needed and then the text or document is matched with the lists. The algorithm then determines which type of words or which sentiment is more prevalent in it.
• This type of rule based sentiment analysis is easy to implement, but lacks flexibility and does not account for context.
• Automatic sentiment analysis: They are mostly based on supervised machine learning algorithms and are actually very useful in understanding complicated texts. Algorithms in this category include support vector machine, linear regression, rnn, and its types. This is what we are gonna explore and learn more about.