"Can a computer be used to determine opinions?"

Supervised by Dr L Guthrie

Abstract

There is a huge amount of human opinion on the web, on message boards, blogs andpersonal web sites. It would be useful if we could have a computer automatically sort through all these opinions and report back with a general overview.

This project investigates if text can be accurately classified based upon the sentiment expressed within it.

Movie reviews are used as a test bed for examining the classification accuracy of a variety of algorithms and classification styles. The results are promising, being able to predict a star rating correctly almost 60% of the time in some circumstances.