Sentiment Analysis of Movie Reviews (1):Bag-of-Words Models

Looking at this text, we already see complexity emerging. As a human reader, I'm sure you'll say this is a negative review, and undoubtedly there are some clearly negative words ("dreadful", "confusing", "terrible"). But to a high degree, negativity comes from negated positive words: "lacking achievement", "wasn't very funny", "not as good as she could have given". So clearly we cannot just look at single words in isolation, but at sequences of words – n-grams (bigrams, trigrams, …) as they say in natural language processing. The question is though, at how many consecutive words should we look?