An Improved Sentiment Analysis Algorithm based on Appraisal Theory and Fuzzy Logic

Millions of comments and opinions are posted daily on websites such as Twitter or Facebook. Users share their opinions on various topics. People need to know the opinions of other people in order to purchase consciously. Businesses also need customers’ opinions and big data analysis to continue serving customer-friendly services, manage customer complaints and suggestions, increase financial benefits, evaluate products, as well as for marketing and business development. With the development of social media, the importance of sentiment analysis has increased, and sentiment analysis has become a very popular topic among computer scientists and researchers, because it has many usages in market and customer feedback analysis. Most sentiment analysis methods suffice to split comments into two negative, positive and neutral categories. But Appraisal Theory considers other characteristics of opinion such as attitude, graduation and orientation which results in more precise analysis. Therefore, this research has proposed an algorithm that increases the accuracy of the sentiment analysis algorithms by combining appraisal theory and fuzzy logic. This algorithm was tested on Stanford data (25,000 comments on the film) and compared with a reliable dictionary. Finally, the algorithm reached the accuracy of 95%. The results of this research can help to manage customer complaints and suggestions, marketing and business development, and product testing.