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Sentiment Analysis

> The canonical NLP task. Most of what you need to know about classical text classification shows up here.

Type: Build

Languages: Python

Prerequisites: Phase 5 · 02 (BoW + TF-IDF), Phase 2 · 14 (Naive Bayes)

Time: ~75 minutes

The Problem

"The food was not great." Positive or negative?

Sentiment sounds simple. A reviewer said they liked or did not like something. Label the sentence. The reason it became the canonical NLP task is that every easy-looking case hides a hard one. Negation flips meaning. Sarcasm inverts it. "Not bad at all" is positive despite two negative-coded words. Emojis carry more signal than surrounding text. Domain vocabulary matters (tight in music review versus tight in fashion review).

Sentiment is a working lab for classical NLP. If you understand why every naive baseline has a specific failure mode, you understand why every richer model was invented. This lesson builds a Naive Bayes baseline from scratch, adds logistic regression, and names the traps that make production sentiment a compliance-grade problem.

The Concept

Classical sentiment is a two-step recipe.

  1. Represent. Turn the text into a feature vector. BoW, TF-IDF, or n-grams.
  2. Classify. Fit a linear model (Naive Bayes, logistic regression, SVM) on labeled examples.

Naive Bayes is the dumbest model that works. Assume every feature is independent given the label. Estimate P(word | positive) and P(word | negative) from counts. At inference, multiply the probabilities. The "naive" independence assumption is laughably wrong and yet the results are shockingly strong. The reason: with sparse text features and moderate data, the classifier cares about which side each word leans toward more than how much.

Logistic regression fixes the independence assumption. It learns a weight per feature, including negative weights. not good as a bigram feature gets a negative weight. Naive Bayes cannot do that for bigrams it has never labeled.

Build It

Step 1: a real mini-dataset

POSITIVE = [
    "absolutely loved this movie",
    "beautiful cinematography and a great story",
    "one of the best films of the year",
    "brilliant acting from the lead",
    "heartwarming and funny",
]

NEGATIVE = [
    "boring and far too long",
    "not worth your time",
    "the plot made no sense",
    "terrible acting, awful script",
    "i want my two hours back",
]

Small on purpose. Real work uses tens of thousands of examples (IMDb, SST-2, Yelp polarity). The math is identical.

Step 2: multinomial Naive Bayes from scratch

import math
from collections import Counter


def train_nb(docs_by_class, vocab, alpha=1.0):
    class_priors = {}
    class_word_probs = {}
    total_docs = sum(len(d) for d in docs_by_class.values())

    for cls, docs in docs_by_class.items():
        class_priors[cls] = len(docs) / total_docs
        counts = Counter()
        for doc in docs:
            for token in doc:
                counts[token] += 1
        total = sum(counts.values()) + alpha * len(vocab)
        class_word_probs[cls] = {
            w: (counts[w] + alpha) / total for w in vocab
        }
    return class_priors, class_word_probs


def predict_nb(doc, class_priors, class_word_probs):
    scores = {}
    for cls in class_priors:
        s = math.log(class_priors[cls])
        for token in doc:
            if token in class_word_probs[cls]:
                s += math.log(class_word_probs[cls][token])
        scores[cls] = s
    return max(scores, key=scores.get)

Additive smoothing (alpha=1.0) is Laplace smoothing. Without it, a word unseen in a class has probability zero and the log explodes. alpha=0.01 is common in practice. alpha=1.0 is the teaching default.

Step 3: logistic regression from scratch

import numpy as np


def sigmoid(x):
    return 1.0 / (1.0 + np.exp(-np.clip(x, -20, 20)))


def train_lr(X, y, epochs=500, lr=0.05, l2=0.01):
    n_features = X.shape[1]
    w = np.zeros(n_features)
    b = 0.0
    for _ in range(epochs):
        logits = X @ w + b
        preds = sigmoid(logits)
        err = preds - y
        grad_w = X.T @ err / len(y) + l2 * w
        grad_b = err.mean()
        w -= lr * grad_w
        b -= lr * grad_b
    return w, b


def predict_lr(X, w, b):
    return (sigmoid(X @ w + b) >= 0.5).astype(int)

L2 regularization matters here. Text features are sparse; without L2 the model memorizes training examples. Start at 0.01 and tune.

Step 4: handling negation (the failure mode)

Consider "not good" and "not bad". A BoW classifier sees {not, good} and {not, bad} and learns from whichever showed up more in training. A bigram classifier sees not_good and not_bad and learns them as distinct features. That is usually enough.

A cruder fix that works when you do not have bigrams: negation scoping. Prefix tokens following a negation word with NOT_ up to the next punctuation.

NEGATION_WORDS = {"not", "no", "never", "nor", "none", "nothing", "neither"}
NEGATION_TERMINATORS = {".", "!", "?", ",", ";"}


def apply_negation(tokens):
    out = []
    negate = False
    for token in tokens:
        if token in NEGATION_TERMINATORS:
            negate = False
            out.append(token)
            continue
        if token in NEGATION_WORDS:
            negate = True
            out.append(token)
            continue
        out.append(f"NOT_{token}" if negate else token)
    return out
>>> apply_negation(["not", "good", "at", "all", ".", "but", "funny"])
['not', 'NOT_good', 'NOT_at', 'NOT_all', '.', 'but', 'funny']

Now good and NOT_good are different features. The classifier can weight them opposite. Three lines of preprocessing, measurable accuracy jump on sentiment benchmarks.

Step 5: evaluation metrics that matter

Accuracy alone is misleading if classes are imbalanced. Real sentiment corpora are usually 70-80% positive or 70-80% negative; a constant-majority classifier gets 80% accuracy and is worthless. Report every one of the following:

For severely imbalanced data (> 95-5 ratio), report AUROC and AUPRC instead of accuracy. AUPRC is more sensitive to the minority class, which is what you usually care about (spam, fraud, rare sentiment).

Common bug to avoid. Reporting micro-F1 instead of macro-F1 on imbalanced data gives a number that looks high because it is dominated by the majority class. Macro-F1 forces you to see the minority-class performance.

def evaluate(y_true, y_pred):
    tp = sum(1 for t, p in zip(y_true, y_pred) if t == 1 and p == 1)
    fp = sum(1 for t, p in zip(y_true, y_pred) if t == 0 and p == 1)
    fn = sum(1 for t, p in zip(y_true, y_pred) if t == 1 and p == 0)
    tn = sum(1 for t, p in zip(y_true, y_pred) if t == 0 and p == 0)
    precision = tp / (tp + fp) if tp + fp else 0
    recall = tp / (tp + fn) if tp + fn else 0
    f1 = 2 * precision * recall / (precision + recall) if precision + recall else 0
    return {"tp": tp, "fp": fp, "tn": tn, "fn": fn, "precision": precision, "recall": recall, "f1": f1}

Use It

scikit-learn does it in six lines, correctly.

from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import TfidfVectorizer
from sklearn.linear_model import LogisticRegression
from sklearn.pipeline import Pipeline

pipe = Pipeline([
    ("tfidf", TfidfVectorizer(ngram_range=(1, 2), min_df=2, sublinear_tf=True, stop_words=None)),
    ("clf", LogisticRegression(C=1.0, max_iter=1000)),
])
pipe.fit(X_train, y_train)
print(pipe.score(X_test, y_test))

Three things to notice. stop_words=None keeps negations. ngram_range=(1, 2) adds bigrams so not_good becomes a feature. sublinear_tf=True dampens repeated words. These three flags are the difference between a 75%-accurate baseline and an 85%-accurate baseline on SST-2.

When to reach for a transformer

If you need any of the above, skip ahead to phase 7 (transformers deep dive). Otherwise, Naive Bayes or logistic regression on TF-IDF plus bigrams plus negation handling is your 2026 production baseline.

The reproducibility trap (again)

Retraining sentiment models is routine. Re-evaluating them is not. Accuracy numbers reported in papers use specific splits, specific preprocessing, specific tokenizers. If you compare your new model to a baseline without using the identical pipeline, you will get misleading deltas. Always regenerate the baseline on your pipeline, not the paper's number.

Ship It

Save as outputs/prompt-sentiment-baseline.md:

name: sentiment-baseline
description: Design a sentiment analysis baseline for a new dataset.
phase: 5
lesson: 05
---

Given a dataset description (domain, language, size, label granularity, latency budget), you output:

1. Feature extraction recipe. Specify tokenizer, n-gram range, stopword policy (usually keep), negation handling (scoped prefix or bigrams).
2. Classifier. Naive Bayes for baseline, logistic regression for production, transformer only if the domain needs sarcasm / aspects / cross-lingual.
3. Evaluation plan. Report precision, recall, F1, confusion matrix, and per-class error samples (not just scalars).
4. One failure mode to monitor post-deployment. Domain drift and sarcasm are the top two.

Refuse to recommend dropping stopwords for sentiment tasks. Refuse to report accuracy as the sole metric when classes are imbalanced (e.g., 90% positive). Flag subword-rich languages as needing FastText or transformer embeddings over word-level TF-IDF.

Exercises

  1. Easy. Add apply_negation as a preprocessing step in the scikit-learn pipeline and measure the F1 delta on a small sentiment dataset.
  2. Medium. Implement class-weighted logistic regression (pass class_weight="balanced" to scikit-learn, or derive the gradient yourself). Measure the effect on a synthetic 90-10 class imbalance.
  3. Hard. Build a sarcasm detector by training a second classifier on the residuals of the sentiment model. Document your experimental setup. Warn the reader when your accuracy is below chance (chance-level on 2-class sarcasm is ~50%, and most first attempts land there).

Key Terms

Term What people say What it actually means
Polarity Positive or negative Binary label; sometimes extended to neutral or fine-grained (5-star).
Aspect-based sentiment Per-aspect polarity Attribute sentiment to specific entities or attributes mentioned in text.
Negation scoping Reversing nearby tokens Prefix tokens after "not" with NOT_ until punctuation.
Laplace smoothing Adding 1 to counts Prevents zero-probability features in Naive Bayes.
L2 regularization Shrinking weights Adds lambda * sum(w^2) to loss. Essential for sparse text features.

Further Reading

← GloVe, FastText, and Subword EmbeddingsNamed Entity Recognition →