A Comparison of Techniques for Sentiment Classification of Film Reviews

We undertake the task of comparing lexicon-based sentiment classification of film reviews with machine learning approaches. We look at existing methodologies and attempt to emulate and improve on them using a 'given' lexicon and a bag-of-words approach. We also utilise syntactical information such as part-of-speech and dependency relations. We will show that a simple lexicon-based classification achieves good results however machine learning techniques prove to be the superior tool. We also show that more features do not necessarily deliver better performance as well as elaborate on three further enhancements not tested in this article.