[Corpora-List] EmoText - Software for opinion mining and lexical affect sensing

[Amanda Schiffrin]

I think Justin has hit the nail on the head here.  I worked on an attempt
to develop a sentiment detection module for a text analytics software
system in my previous job, and I soon realised that once you start working
with real data, both statistical and grammatical ('semantic') approaches
will fail.  You need a more complex model of information in order to be
able to understand that a tweet such as "Bummer, I left my iPhone on the
bus - I'm lost without it :-(", despite containing only indicators of
negative sentiment at the lexical level, still expresses high positive
sentiment toward the *product*.  Being able to distinguish this kind of
sentiment is one of the main drivers of commercial sentiment detection, and
I'd say we're still a very long way away from anything like that level of
sophistication.

Mandy Schiffrin


On 16 December 2011 20:24, Justin Washtell <lec3jrw at leeds.ac.uk> wrote:

> "I would be very sad if this movie did not win a prize."
>                      high_neg
> "I'm very happy that the other reviewers have seen this movie for what it
> is: rubbish."         high_pos
>
> Rather than (unfairly) singling out this system, I think these examples
> serve to highlight that this is a very difficult (if not impossibly
> ill-defined) problem. One cannot just assess the polarity of a statement -
> one needs to know something about what the object of interest is. In the
> above cases we are probably interested in [the writer's opinion of] the
> movie... but that fact is of course *pragmatic* information.
>
> I'm out of my depth now, so I'll say no more :-) No doubt much has been
> written on these issues.
>
> Justin Washtell
> University of Leeds
>
> ________________________________________
> From: corpora-bounces at uib.no [corpora-bounces at uib.no] On Behalf Of Angus
> Grieve-Smith [grvsmth at panix.com]
> Sent: 16 December 2011 17:25
> To: corpora at uib.no
> Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] EmoText - Software for opinion mining and
> lexical affect sensing
>
> On 12/16/2011 9:01 AM, Alexander Osherenko wrote:
> > You didn't test the approach for complex sentences. I always used the
> > example "I am very sad if ..."
>
>     I don't want to nitpick, but that's not a very nativelike example
> for a test sentence.  I've only heard English speakers use "I am very
> sad if ..." in habitual or generic contexts, and even then "I get very
> sad when ..." is much more common.  "I would be very sad if ..." is also
> used.  Maybe check your test sentences against the CoCA or something?
>
> --
>                                -Angus B. Grieve-Smith
>                                grvsmth at panix.com
>
>
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