With the rapid increase of the number of Internet users and the amount of online comment data, a large number of referable information samples are provided for data mining technology. As a technical application of data mining, text sentiment classification can be widely used in public opinion management, marketing, and other fields. In this study, a combination approach to SVM (support vector machine) and IPSO (improved particle swarm optimization) is proposed to classify sentiment by using text data. First, the text data of 30,000 goods reviews and corresponding ratings are collected through the web crawler. Then, TFIDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency) and Word2vec are used to vectorize the goods review text data. Next, the proposed classification model is trained by the SVM, and the initial parameters of the SVM are optimized by the IPSO. Finally, we applied the trained SVM-IPSO model to the test set and evaluated the performance by several measures. Our experiment results indicate that the proposed model performed the best for text data sentiment classification. Additionally, the traditional machine learning model SVM becomes very effective after parameter optimization, which demonstrates that the parameters’ optimization by IPSO has successfully improved the classification accuracy. Furthermore, our proposed model SVM-IPSO significantly outperforms other benchmark models, indicating that it could be applied to improve the accuracy and efficiency for text data sentiment classification.