A Comparison of Machine Learning Algorithms in Opinion Polarity Classification of Customer Reviews

Abstract: In this paper we analyze reviews written by customers of an online shop, by employing opinion polarity classification on document level using five machine learning algorithms: Na¨ive Bayes, Support Vector Machine, Neural networks, C4.5 algorithm and classifier based on maximum entropy. We achieved the best results using Support Vector Machine algorithm (accuracy=0.845) and maximum entropy classifier (accuracy=0.84). Although those results are not as good as results that can be achieved in topic-based categorization, compared to similar researches in opinion polarity classification, they indicate a relatively good predictive performance of classical machine learning algorithms.