Constructing a domain-specific sentiment lexicon for agricultural product reviews using BERT and SO-PMI

Abstract

The absence of a sentiment lexicon tailored to agricultural product reviews presents significant challenges for accurate sentiment analysis in this domain. Existing general-purpose lexicons, such as NTUSD, HOWNET, and BosonNLP, fail to capture the unique linguistic features of agricultural reviews, leading to suboptimal classification performance. To address this gap, this study constructs the BSTS sentiment lexicon, using a dataset of 19,843 preprocessed reviews from JD.com. Positive and negative seed words were extracted through BERT-based Term Frequency (TF) analysis, and the SO-PMI algorithm was applied to calculate sentiment scores for candidate words. By determining an optimal threshold, a balanced and effective lexicon was developed. Experimental results demonstrate that the BSTS lexicon outperforms existing lexicons in sentiment classification, achieving precision, recall, and F1 scores of 85.21%, 91.92%, and 88.44%, respectively. Furthermore, additional experiments on Taobao’s agricultural product reviews confirmed the lexicon’s robustness, with performance metrics of 93.28% precision and 87.34% F1 score, highlighting its effectiveness across different e-commerce platforms. The BSTS lexicon significantly improves sentiment classification in the agricultural domain, offering a reliable and domain-specific tool for sentiment analysis in agricultural product reviews.