Automatic construction of a context-aware sentiment lexicon: An optimization approach

Yue Lu, Malu Castellanos, Umeshwar Dayal, Cheng Xiang Zhai

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

The explosion of Web opinion data has made essential the need for automatic tools to analyze and understand people's sentiments toward different topics. In most sentiment analysis applications, the sentiment lexicon plays a central role. However, it is well known that there is no universally optimal sentiment lexicon since the polarity of words is sensitive to the topic domain. Even worse, in the same domain the same word may indicate different polarities with respect to different aspects. For example, in a laptop review, \large" is negative for the battery aspect while being positive for the screen aspect. In this paper, we focus on the problem of learning a sentiment lexicon that is not only domain specific but also dependent on the aspect in context given an unlabeled opinionated text collection. We propose a novel optimization framework that provides a unified and principled way to combine different sources of information for learning such a context-dependent sentiment lexicon. Experiments on two data sets (hotel reviews and customer feedback surveys on printers) show that our approach can not only identify new sentiment words specific to the given domain but also determine the different polarities of a word depending on the aspect in context. In further quantitative evaluation, our method is proved to be effective in constructing a high quality lexicon by comparing with a human annotated gold standard. In addition, using the learned context-dependent sentiment lexicon improved the accuracy in an aspect-level sentiment classification task.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 20th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW 2011
Pages347-356
Number of pages10
DOIs
StatePublished - 2011
Event20th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW 2011 - Hyderabad, India
Duration: Mar 28 2011Apr 1 2011

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 20th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW 2011

Other

Other20th International Conference on World Wide Web, WWW 2011
Country/TerritoryIndia
CityHyderabad
Period3/28/114/1/11

Keywords

  • Opinion mining
  • Optimization
  • Sentiment analysis
  • Sentiment lexicon

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications

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