• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.71-89
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• 2016

Sentiment analysis is used for identifying emotions or sentiments embedded in the user generated data such as customer reviews from blogs, social network services, and so on. Various research fields such as computer science and business management can take advantage of this feature to analyze customer-generated opinions. In previous studies, the star rating of a review is regarded as the same as sentiment embedded in the text. However, it does not always correspond to the sentiment polarity. Due to this supposition, previous studies have some limitations in their accuracy. To solve this issue, the present study uses a supervised sentiment classification model to measure a more accurate sentiment polarity. This study aims to propose an advanced sentiment classifier and to discover the correlation between movie reviews and box-office success. The advanced sentiment classifier is based on two supervised machine learning techniques, the Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Feedforward Neural Network (FNN). The sentiment scores of the movie reviews are measured by the sentiment classifier and are analyzed by statistical correlations between movie reviews and box-office success. Movie reviews are collected along with a star-rate. The dataset used in this study consists of 1,258,538 reviews from 175 films gathered from Naver Movie website (movie.naver.com). The results show that the proposed sentiment classifier outperforms Naive Bayes (NB) classifier as its accuracy is about 6% higher than NB. Furthermore, the results indicate that there are positive correlations between the star-rate and the number of audiences, which can be regarded as the box-office success of a movie. The study also shows that there is the mild, positive correlation between the sentiment scores estimated by the classifier and the number of audiences. To verify the applicability of the sentiment scores, an independent sample t-test was conducted. For this, the movies were divided into two groups using the average of sentiment scores. The two groups are significantly different in terms of the star-rated scores.