*Article* **Exploring Impact of Age and Gender on Sentiment Analysis Using Machine Learning**

**Sudhanshu Kumar 1,***∗***, Monika Gahalawat 1, Partha Pratim Roy <sup>1</sup> and Debi Prosad Dogra <sup>2</sup> and Byung-Gyu Kim 3,***<sup>∗</sup>*


Received: 25 January 2020; Accepted: 17 February 2020; Published: 22 February 2020

**Abstract:** Sentiment analysis is a rapidly growing field of research due to the explosive growth in digital information. In the modern world of artificial intelligence, sentiment analysis is one of the essential tools to extract emotion information from massive data. Sentiment analysis is applied to a variety of user data from customer reviews to social network posts. To the best of our knowledge, there is less work on sentiment analysis based on the categorization of users by demographics. Demographics play an important role in deciding the marketing strategies for different products. In this study, we explore the impact of age and gender in sentiment analysis, as this can help e-commerce retailers to market their products based on specific demographics. The dataset is created by collecting reviews on books from Facebook users by asking them to answer a questionnaire containing questions about their preferences in books, along with their age groups and gender information. Next, the paper analyzes the segmented data for sentiments based on each age group and gender. Finally, sentiment analysis is done using different Machine Learning (ML) approaches including maximum entropy, support vector machine, convolutional neural network, and long short term memory to study the impact of age and gender on user reviews. Experiments have been conducted to identify new insights into the effect of age and gender for sentiment analysis.

**Keywords:** sentiment analysis; social media; machine learning; lexicon
