We propose a novel method for counting sentiment orientation that outperforms supervised learning approaches in time and memory complexity and is not statistically significantly different from them in accuracy. Our method consists of a novel approach to generating unigram, bigram and trigram lexicons. The proposed method, called frequentiment, is based on calculating the frequency of features (words) in the document and averaging their impact on the sentiment score as opposed to documents that do not contain these features. Afterwards, we use ensemble classification to improve the overall accuracy of the method. What is important is that the frequentiment-based lexicons with sentiment threshold selection outperform other popular lexicons and some supervised learners, while being 3–5 times faster than the supervised approach. We compare 37 methods (lexicons, ensembles with lexicon’s predictions as input and supervised learners) applied to 10 Amazon review data sets and provide the first statistical comparison of the sentiment annotation methods that include ensemble approaches. It is one of the most comprehensive comparisons of domain sentiment analysis in the literature.

It has been shown in this paper that simplistic Bag of Words (BoW) lexicon methods for sentiment polarity assignment with ensemble classifiers are much faster than a supervised approach to sentiment classification while yielding similar accuracy. BoW methods also proved to be efficient and fast across all examined datasets. Moreover, a new approach to lexicon extraction that can be successfully used for sentiment polarity assignment is presented in the paper. It has been shown that accuracy obtained from such lexicons outperforms other lexicon based approaches.

A method for sentiment polarity assignment for textual content written in Polish using supervised machine learning approach with transfer learning scheme is proposed in the paper. It has been shown that performing simple natural language processing steps prior to classification, provides inspiring results without redundant computation overhead. The documents containing subjective opinions were classified using N-gram and Bi-gram language model that is able to encode some of complex word phrases. The experiments carried out on two real datasets taken from different domains proved that learning on one dataset and testing on another, which is commonly called transfer learning, can be effective and may result in very high classification quality.