Resource Creation Towards Automated Sentiment Analysis in Telugu (a low resource language) and Integrating Multiple Domain Sources to Enhance Sentiment Prediction

Abstract

Understanding the polarity or sentiment of a text is an important task in many application scenarios. Sentiment Analysis of a text can be used to answer various questions such as election prediction, favouredness towards any product etc. But the sentiment analysis task becomes challenging when it comes to low resource languages because the basis of learning sentiment classifiers are annotated datasets and annotated datasets for non-English texts hardly exists. So for the development of sentiment classifiers in Telugu, we have created corpora "Sentiraama" for different domains like movie reviews, song lyrics, product reviews and book reviews in Telugu language with the text written in Telugu script. In this paper, we describe the process of creating the corpora and assigning polarities to them. After the creation of corpora, we trained the classifiers that yields good classification results. Typically a sentiment classifier is trained using data from the same domain it is intended to be tested on. But there may not be sufficient data available in the same domain and additionally using data from multiple sources and domains may help in creating a more generalized sentiment classifier which can be applied to multiple domains. So to create this generalized classifier, we used the sentiment data from the above corpus from different domains. We first tested the performance of sentiment analysis models built using single data source for both in-domain and cross-domain classification. Later, we built sentiment model using data samples from multiple domains and then tested the performance of the models based on their classification. Finally, we compared all the three approaches based on the performance of the models and discussed the best approach for sentiment analysis.