Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques can prove relevant to a variety of specialties in the field of cognitive science, including sentiment analysis. This paper investigates the impact of NLP tools, various sentiment features and sentiment lexicon generation approaches to sentiment polarity classification of internet reviews written in Persian language. For this purpose, a comprehensive Persian WordNet (FerdowsNet), with high recall and proper precision (based on Princeton WordNet), was developed. Using FerdowsNet and a generated corpus of reviews, a Persian sentiment lexicon was developed using i) mapping to the SentiWordNet and ii) a semi-supervised learning method, after which the results of both methods were compared. In addition to sentiment words, a set of various features were extracted and applied to the sentiment classification. Then, by employing various well-known feature selection approaches and state-of-the-art machine learning methods, a sentiment classification for Persian text reviews was carried out. The obtained results demonstrate the critical role of sentiment lexicon quality in improving the quality of sentiment classification in Persian language.

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