Sentiment Polarity Detection in Azerbaijani Social News Articles

Text classification field of natural language processing has been experiencing remarkable growth in recent years. Especially, sentiment analysis has received a considerable attention from both industry and research community. However, only a few research examples exist for Azerbaijani language. The main objective of this research is to apply various machine learning algorithms for determining the sentiment of news articles in Azerbaijani language. Approximately, 30.000 social news articles have been collected from online news sites and labeled manually as negative or positive according to their sentiment categories. Initially, text preprocessing was implemented to data in order to eliminate the noise. Secondly, to convert text to a more machine-readable form, BOW (bag of words) model has been applied. More specifically, two methodologies of BOW model, which are tf-idf and frequency based model have been used as vectorization methods. Additionally, SVM, Random Forest, and Naive Bayes algorithms have been applied as the classification algorithms, and their combinations with two vectorization approaches have been tested and analyzed. Experimental results indicate that SVM outperforms other classification algorithms.