Feature Selection Methods in Persian Sentiment Analysis

With the enormous growth of digital content in internet, various types of online reviews such as product and movie reviews present a wealth of subjective information that can be very helpful for potential users. Sentiment analysis aims to use automated tools to detect subjective information from reviews. Up to now as there are few researches conducted on feature selection in sentiment analysis, there are very rare works for Persian sentiment analysis. This paper considers the problem of sentiment classification using different feature selection methods for online customer reviews in Persian language. Three of the challenges of Persian text are using of a wide variety of declensional suffixes, different word spacing and many informal or colloquial words. In this paper we study these challenges by proposing a model for sentiment classification of Persian review documents. The proposed model is based on stemming and feature selection and is employed Naive Bayes algorithm for classification. We evaluate the performance of the model on a collection of cellphone reviews, where the results show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.