Abstract:

Sentiment Analysis deals with the analysis of emotions, opinions and facts in the sentences which are expressed by the people. It allows us to track attitudes and feelings of the people by analyzing blogs, comments, reviews and tweets about all the aspects. The development of Internet has strong influence in all types of industries like tourism, healthcare and any business. The availability of Internet has changed the way of accessing the information and sharing their experience among users. Social media provide this information and these comments are trusted by other users. This paper recognizes the use and impact of social media on healthcare industry by analyzing the users' feelings expressed in the form of free text, thereby gives the quality indicators of services or features related with them. In this paper, a sentiment classifier model using improved Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) method and linear regression model has been proposed to classify online reviews, tweets or customer feedback for various features. The model involves the process of gathering online user reviews about hospitals and 'analyzes' those reviews in terms of sentiments expressed. Information Extraction process filters irrelevant reviews, extracts sentimental words of features identified and quantifies the sentiment of features using sentiment dictionary. Emotionally expressed positive or negative words are assigned weights using the classification prescribed in the dictionary. The sentiment analysis on tweets/reviews is done for various features using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) techniques. The proposed linear regression model using the senti-score predicts the star rating of the feature of service. The statistical results show that improved TF-IDF method gives better accuracy when compared with TF and TF-IDF methods, used for representing the text. The senti-score obtained as a result of text analysis (user feedback) on features gives not only the opinion summarization but also the comparative results on various features of different competitors. This information can be used by business to focus on the low scored features so as to improve their business and ensure a very high level of user satisfaction.

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