Optimisation of Sentiment Analysis for E-Commerce

Sentiment analysis is widely used today to make data-driven decisions in different industries, starting from marketing and including brand management, reputation monitoring, and customer satisfaction analysis. Its growing importance is closely linked with so-called ‘word-of-mouth’ communication, from reading online reviews to writing comments on social networks. Effective separation of sentiments ensures that companies' responses are timely and critical patterns are seen in big data sets. Statistical measures, information gain, correlation-based approaches, etc, have been employed for the feature selection. Still, the problem associated with text data mining is that they don’t convey the text's relative difficulty and additional features. To fill this gap, our research proposes a new feature selection technique through Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and K Nearest Neighbour (KNN) performed on 28,000 customer reviews in different product categories. The results, therefore, showed an overall accuracy of 80.1%, with the Support Vector Machine (SVM) set at 80.5% on each selected feature, which was slightly higher than the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), which scored a 78.41% accuracy. SVM remains on the mark of 83%, and for CNN, the rate achieved on the same was 80.8% when both were applied to the entire dataset. These facts rejected the infallibility of the simple and complex algorithms used singly in the sentiment classification, indicating that more sophisticated algorithms like ACO and KNN can provide business solutions to improve their service delivery based on customers’ feedback.