Split over-training for unsupervised purchase intention identification

Recognizing user-expressed intentions in social media can be useful for many applications such as business intelligence, as intentions are intimately linked to potential actions or behaviors. This paper focuses on a binary classification problem: whether a text expresses purchase intention (PI) or not (non-PI). In contrast to existing research, which relies on labeled intention corpus or linguistic knowledge, we proposed an unsupervised method called split over-training for the PI identification task. Experiments on PI identification from tweets showed that our approach was effective and promising. The best classifying accuracy of 84.6% and PI F-measure of 70.4% was achieved, which are only 7.7% and 4.9% respectively lower than fully supervised models. This means our unsupervised method may provide reasonable preprocessing for intention corpus labeling or intention knowledge acquisition.