Evaluation of sentiment polarity prediction using a dimensional and a categorical approach

In this paper we evaluate two approaches for predicting the sentiment polarity of an utterance. The first method is based on a 3-dimensional model which takes into account text expressiveness in terms of valence, arousal and dominance. The second one determines the word's semantic orientation according to Chi-square and Relevance factor statistic metrics. We describe the general flow of the methods and their extracted features, as well as their predictability potential using different machine learning algorithms, Naïve Bayes, SVM and C4.5. The evaluation is performed on four emotional datasets: Semeval 2007 “Affective Text”, ISEAR (International Survey on Emotional Antecedents and Reactions), children's fairy-tales and a movie review dataset. The results show a high correlation of the prediction performance with the database content, as well as to the average number of words within the classified text instances.