Polarity classification tool for sentiment analysis in Malay language

Abstract

The popularity of the social media channels has increased the interest among researchers in the sentiment analysis (SA) area. One aspect of the SA research is the determination of the polarity of the comments in the social media, i.e. positive, negative, and neutral. However, there is a scarcity of Malay sentiment analysis tools because most of the work in the literature discuss the polarity classification tool in English. This paper presents the development of a polarity classification tool called Malay Polarity Classification Tool (MaCT). This tool is developed based on the AFINN sentiment lexicon for English language. We have attempted to translate each word in AFINN to its Malay equivalent and later, use the lexicon to collect the sentiment data from Twitter. The Twitter data are then classified into positive, negative, and neutral. For the validation purpose, we collect 400 positive tweets, 400 negative tweets, and 200 neutral tweets, and later, run the tweets through our sentiment lexicon and found 90% score for precision, recall and accuracy. Our main contribution in the research is the new AFINN translation for Malay language and also the classification of the sentiment data.