SENTIDA: A New Tool for Sentiment Analysis in Danish

In the midst of the Era of Big Data, tools for analysing and processing unstructured data are needed more than ever. Being among these, sentiment analysis has experienced both a substantial proliferation in popularity and major developmental progress. However, the development of sentiment analysis tools in Danish has not experienced the same rapid development as e.g. English tools. Few Danish tools exist, and often the ones available are either ineffective or outdated. Moreover, authoritative validation tests in low-resource languages, are missing, which is why little can be deduced about the competence of current Danish models. We present SENTIDA, a simple and effective model for general sentiment analysis in Danish, and compare its competence to the current benchmark within the field of Danish sentiment analysis, AFINN. Combining a lexical approach with several incorporated functions, we construct SENTIDA and categorise it as a domain-independent sentiment analysis tool focusing on polarity strength. Subsequently, we run different validation tests, including a binary classification test of Trustpilot reviews and a correlation test based on manually rated texts from different domains. The results show that SENTIDA excels across all tests, predicting reviews with an accuracy above 80% in all trials and providing significant correlations with manually annotated texts

Scoring and Classifying Implicit Positive Interpretations:A Challenge of Class Imbalance

This paper reports on a reimplementation of a system on detecting implicit positive meaning from negated statements. In the original regression experiment, different positive interpretations per negation are scored according to their likelihood. We convert the scores to classes and report our results on both the regression and classification tasks. We show that a baseline taking the mean score or most frequent class is hard to beat because of class imbalance in the dataset. Our error analysis indicates that an approach that takes the information structure into account (i.e. which information is new or contrastive) may be promising, which requires looking beyond the syntactic and semantic characteristics of negated statements

An Arithmetization of Logical Oppositions

An arithmetic theory of oppositions is devised by comparing expressions, Boolean bitstrings, and integers. This leads to a set of correspondences between three domains of investigation, namely: logic, geometry, and arithmetic. The structural properties of each area are investigated in turn, before justifying the procedure as a whole. Io finish, I show how this helps to improve the logical calculus of oppositions, through the consideration of corresponding operations between integers

Negative Concord without Agree: Insights from German, Dutch and English Child Language

Children acquiring a non-negative concord language like English or German have been found to consistently interpret sentences with two negative elements in a negative concord manner as conveying a single semantic negation. Corpus-based investigations for English and German show that children also produce sentences with two negative elements but only a single negation meaning. As any approach to negative concord and negative indefinites needs to account for both the typological variation and the child data, we revisit the three most current syntactic Agree-based analyses, as well as a movement-based approach and show that they either have difficulties with the child data or face challenges in the adult language variation or both. As a consequence, we develop a novel analysis of negative concord and negative indefinites which relies on purely morphological operations applying to hierarchical semantic representations within a version of the Meaning First architecture of grammar. We will argue that the typological variation between the main three different types of languages as well as the children’s non adult-like behaviour fall out from this in a straightforward fashion while the downsides of the Agree- and the movement-based accounts are avoided.European Research Council (ERC)Peer Reviewe

The Spread of Change in French Negation

Many varieties of French have changed over the years from expressing predicate negation (Geurts 1998) with ne alone, to the embracing construction ne ... pas, and then to postverbal pas alone (Jespersen 1917). When the increase in the frequency of ne ... pas over time is plotted on a graph, it takes the S shape of the logistic function (Kroch 1989). Bybee and Thompson (1997) note that the type frequency of a pattern determines its degree of productivity, but high frequency forms with alternations resist analogical leveling.\u27 These two observations provide an explanation for the logistic progression observed by Kroch (1989). Following Lotka (1925) and Volterra (1926), we can extend this model to take into account the competition between constructions to express the same function. To test these models, I have compiled a corpus of French theatrical texts from the twelfth to the twentieth century. The logistic function accurately models the use of ne ... pas in these texts (R2 = 0.899), but the Lotka-Volterra model predicts the post-1600 changes in preverbal ne alone and embracing ne ... pas and ne ... point with even greater accuracy (r = 0.948 and 0.978)

Subject-Object Asymmetries in English Sentences with Two Negatives

This paper presents the results of an experimental study on gradient acceptability of English sentences with two negatives such as ‘John didn’t eat nothing’ and ‘nobody didn’t eat’. These sentences have two possible interpretations. In the Negative Concord interpretation, the two negatives contribute a single semantic negation (e.g. ‘John ate nothing’). In the Double Negation interpretation, each negative contributes a semantic negation, yielding a logical affirmative (e.g. ‘John ate something’). Negative Concord is heavily stigmatized in contemporary English. The results of this study show that despite their overall unacceptability, Negative Concord sentences with a negative object are significantly more acceptable than Negative Concord sentences with a negative subject. This subject-object asymmetry is not present in Double Negation sentences, which are equally unacceptable with negative subjects and negative objects. This paper discusses how these results support the hypothesis that Negative Concord constructions have the same underlying structure as Negative Polarity Item constructions (e.g. John didn’t eat anything), which also exhibit subject-object asymmetries in acceptability (cf. *Anybody didn’t eat.

The language of extraversion: Extraverted people talk more abstractly, introverts are more concrete

To understand the impact of personality, one needs to know how personality differences manifest themselves in language use. The present study investigates the link between extraversion and language abstraction. Participants’ spontaneous verbal utterances in face-to-face interactions were analyzed for language abstraction by applying the linguistic category model, which distinguishes predicate types that convey information in concrete or interpretative manner. We also applied the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) program to relate several word categories to extraversion and language abstraction. Results show significant positive correlations between extraversion and both language abstraction and self-reported level of interpretation. Language abstraction was also linked to LIWC variables (e.g., articles, numbers) previously shown to be related to extraversion. The findings suggest that the verbal style of extraverts is characterized by a higher level of abstract interpretation, whereas introverts tend to stick to concrete facts