In this paper, Mahalanobis Distance (MD) has been proposed as a measure to classify the sentiment expressed in a review document as either positive or negative. A new method for representing the text documents using Representative Terms (RT) has been used. The new way of representing text documents using few representative dimensions is relatively a new concept, which is successfully demonstrated in this paper. The MD based classifier performed with 70.8% of accuracy for the experiments carried out using the benchmark dataset containing 25000 movie reviews. The hybrid of MD based Classifier (MDC) and Multi Layer Perceptron (MLP) resulted in a 98.8% of classification accuracy, which is the highest ever reported accuracy for a dataset containing 25000 reviews. © 2016, Zarka Private Univ. All rights reserved.