Publication Date

Spring 2019

Degree Type

Master's Project

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Computer Science

First Advisor

Mike Wu

Second Advisor

Robert Chun

Third Advisor

Neraj Bobra

Keywords

sentiment bias, search results, LSTM model, word embeddings

Abstract

The chief purpose of this study is to detect and eliminate the sentiment bias in a search engine. Sentiment bias means a bias induced in the search results based on the sentiment of the user’s search query. As people increasing depend on search engines for information, it is important to understand the quality of results produced by the search engines. This study does not try to build a search engine but leverage the existing search engines to provide better results to the user. In this study, only the queries that have high sentiment polarity are analyzed and the machine learning models are used to predict the sentiment polarity of the input query, sentiment polarity of the documents produced by the search engine for the given query and also to change the sentiment polarity of the input query to its opposite sentiment. This project proposes an end-to-end system that eliminates the search engine bias by producing results that align with the query sentiment as well as the opposite sentiment. The system comprising of three models for document level sentiment analysis, aspect level sentiment analysis and sentiment style transfer. The document level sentiment analyzer is an LSTM based model that uses GloVe word embeddings to analyze the sentiment of the documents produced by the search engine. The aspect level sentiment analyzer uses deep memory network with attention and auxiliary memory to analyze the sentiment of each search query. In order to obtain the iv

documents of the opposite polarity, the sentiment of the search query is reversed using the sentiment style transfer model that uses a bi-directional LSTM. The results are analyzed to determine the sentiment bias of the search engine based on the input query. In our experiments, we observed that positive sentiment queries yielded 67% documents with positive sentiment and negative sentiment queries yielded 70% documents with negative sentiment. The proposed system eliminates this bias by providing the users with two sets of result, one with positive sentiment and one with negative sentiment.

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