| dc.description.abstract | The area of Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis emerges from the need for automated processing of textual information about reviews posted in the web. The main motivation of this area is the constant volume growth of such information, provided by the technologies brought by Web 2.0, that makes impossible the monitoring and analysis of these reviews that are useful for users, who desire to purchase new products, and for companies to identify market demand as well. Currently, the most studies of Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis that make use of data mining aims to the development of techniques that seek a better knowledge representation and using classification techniques commonly applied and they not explore others classifiers that work well in other problems. Thus, this work aims a comparative empirical research of the ap-plication of the classical model of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), the multilayer perceptron, in the Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis problem. For this, reviews datasets are defined and techniques for textual knowledge representation applied to these aiming an equal texts rep-resentation for the classifiers. From this representation, the classifiers Support Vector Machines (SVM), Naïve Bayes (NB) and ANN are applied considering three data context: (i) balanced datasets, (ii) datasets with different unbalanced ratio and (iii) datasets with the application of random undersampling technique for the unbalanced handling. The unbalanced context inves-tigation and of others originated from it becomes relevant once datasets available in the web ordinarily contain more positive opinions than negative. For the classifiers evaluation, metrics both for the classification perform and for run time are used. The results obtained in the bal-anced context indicate that ANN outperformed significantly the others classifiers and, although it has a large computation cost for the training fase, the ANN classifier provides classification time (real-time) significantly less than the classifier that obtained the results closer than ANN. For the unbalanced context, the ANN are sensitive to the growth of noise representation and the unbalanced growth while the NB classifier stood out. With the undersampling application, the ANN classifier is equivalent to the others classifiers attaining competitive results. However, it can not be the most appropriate classifier to this context when the training and classification time and its little advantage of classification accuracy are considered. | en |
