Through a survey of literature, the role of sentiment classification in sentiment analysis has been reviewed. The review identifies the research challenges involved in tackling sentiment classification. A total of 68 articles during 2015 – 2017 have been reviewed on six dimensions viz., sentiment classification, feature extraction, cross-lingual sentiment classification, cross-domain sentiment classification, lexica and corpora creation and multi-label sentiment classification. This study discusses the prominence and effects of sentiment classification in sentiment evaluation and a lot of further research needs to be done for productive results. © 2018, National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR). All rights reserved.