Opinion mining is a subfield of data mining and natural language processing that concerns with extracting users’ opinion and attitude towards products or services from their comments on the Web. Persian opinion mining, in contrast to its counterpart in English, is a totally new field of study and hence, it has not received the attention it deserves. Existing methods for opinion mining in the Persian language may be classified into machine learning– and lexicon-based approaches. These methods have been proposed and successfully used for polarity-detection problem. However, when they should be used for more complex tasks like rating prediction, their results are not desirable. In this study, first an exhaustive investigation of machine learning– and lexicon-based methods is performed. Then, a new hybrid method is proposed for rating-prediction problem in the Persian language. Finally, the effect of machine learning component, feature-selection method, normalisation method and combination level are investigated. The experimental results on a large data set containing 16,000 Persian customers’ review show that this proposed system achieves higher performance in comparison to Naïve Bayes algorithm and a pure lexicon-based method. Moreover, results demonstrate that this proposed method may also be successfully used for polarity detection.
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