Obtaining the IMDb movie review dataset

Sentiment analysis, sometimes also called opinion mining, is a popular sub-discipline of the broader field of NLP; it analyzes the polarity of documents. A popular task in sentiment analysis is the classification of documents based on the expressed opinions or emotions of the authors with regard to a particular topic.

In this chapter, we will be working with a large dataset of movie reviews from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) that has been collected by Maas et al. (A. L. Maas, R. E. Daly, P. T. Pham, D. Huang, A. Y. Ng, and C. Potts. Learning Word Vectors for Sentiment Analysis. In the proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 142–150, Portland, Oregon, USA, June 2011. Association for Computational Linguistics). The movie review dataset consists of 50,000 polar movie reviews that are labeled as either positive or negative; here, positive means that a movie was rated...