A Linked Open Data Approach for Sentiment Lexicon Adaptation

Social media platforms have recently become a gold mine for organisations to monitor their reputation by extracting and analysing the sentiment of the posts generated about them, their markets, and competitors. Among the approaches to analyse sentiment from social media, approaches based on sentiment lexicons (sets of words with associated sentiment scores) have gained popularity since they do not rely on training data, as opposed to Machine Learning approaches. However, sentiment lexicons consider a static sentiment score for each word without taking into consideration the different contexts in which the word is used (e.g, great problem vs. great smile). Additionally, new words constantly emerge from dynamic and rapidly changing social media environments that may not be covered by the lexicons. In this paper we propose a lexicon adaptation approach that makes use of semantic relations extracted from DBpedia to better understand the various contextual scenarios in which words are used. We evaluate our approach on three different Twitter datasets and show that using semantic information to adapt the lexicon improves sentiment computation by 3.7% in average accuracy, and by 2.6% in average F1 measure

Sentiment Lexicon Adaptation with Context and Semantics for the Social Web

Sentiment analysis over social streams offers governments and organisations a fast and effective way to monitor the publics' feelings towards policies, brands, business, etc. General purpose sentiment lexicons have been used to compute sentiment from social streams, since they are simple and effective. They calculate the overall sentiment of texts by using a general collection of words, with predetermined sentiment orientation and strength. However, words' sentiment often vary with the contexts in which they appear, and new words might be encountered that are not covered by the lexicon, particularly in social media environments where content emerges and changes rapidly and constantly. In this paper, we propose a lexicon adaptation approach that uses contextual as well as semantic information extracted from DBPedia to update the words' weighted sentiment orientations and to add new words to the lexicon. We evaluate our approach on three different Twitter datasets, and show that enriching the lexicon with contextual and semantic information improves sentiment computation by 3.4% in average accuracy, and by 2.8% in average F1 measure

Three Essays on Opinion Mining of Social Media Texts

This dissertation research is a collection of three essays on opinion mining of social media texts. I explore different theoretical and methodological perspectives in this inquiry. The first essay focuses on improving lexicon-based sentiment classification. I propose a method to automatically generate a sentiment lexicon that incorporates knowledge from both the language domain and the content domain. This method learns word associations from a large unannotated corpus. These associations are used to identify new sentiment words. Using a Twitter data set containing 743,069 tweets related to the stock market, I show that the sentiment lexicons generated using the proposed method significantly outperforms existing sentiment lexicons in sentiment classification. As sentiment analysis is being applied to different types of documents to solve different problems, the proposed method provides a useful tool to improve sentiment classification. The second essay focuses on improving supervised sentiment classification. In previous work on sentiment classification, a document was typically represented as a collection of single words. This method of feature representation suffers from severe ambiguity, especially in classifying short texts, such as microblog messages. I propose the use of dependency features in sentiment classification. A dependency describes the relationship between a pair of words even when they are distant. I compare the sentiment classification performance of dependency features with a few commonly used features in different experiment settings. The results show that dependency features significantly outperform existing feature representations. In the third essay, I examine the relationship between social media sentiment and stock returns. This is the first study to test the bidirectional effects in this relationship. Based on theories in behavioral finance research, I speculate that social media sentiment does not predict stock return, but rather that stock return predicts social media sentiment. I empirically test a set of research hypotheses by applying the vector autoregression (VAR) model on a social media data set, which is much larger than those used in previous studies. The hypotheses are supported by the results. The findings have significant implications for both theory and practice

Domain-Specific Sentiment Lexicon for Classification

Nowadays people express their opinions about products, government policies, schemes and programs over social media sites using web or mobile. At the present time, in our country, government changes policies in every sector and people follow with the eyes or the mind on these policies and express their opinion by writing comments on social media especially using Facebook news media pages. Therefore, our research group intends to do sentiment analysis on new articles. Domain-specific sentiment lexicon has played an important role in opinion mining system. Due to the ubiquitous domain diversity and absence of domain-specific prior knowledge, construction of domain-specific lexicon has become a challenging research topic in recent year. In this paper, lexicon construction for sentiment analysis is described. In this work, there are two main steps: (1) pre-processing on raw data comments that are extracted from Facebook news media pages and (2) constructing lexicon for coming classification work. The word correlation and chi-square statistic are applied to construct lexicon as desired. Experimental results on comments datasets demonstrate that proposed approach is suitable for construction the domain-specific lexicon

Sentiment analysis of clinical narratives: A scoping review

A clinical sentiment is a judgment, thought or attitude promoted by an observation with respect to the health of an individual. Sentiment analysis has drawn attention in the healthcare domain for secondary use of data from clinical narratives, with a variety of applications including predicting the likelihood of emerging mental illnesses or clinical outcomes. The current state of research has not yet been summarized. This study presents results from a scoping review aiming at providing an overview of sentiment analysis of clinical narratives in order to summarize existing research and identify open research gaps. The scoping review was carried out in line with the PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews) guideline. Studies were identified by searching 4 electronic databases (e.g., PubMed, IEEE Xplore) in addition to conducting backward and forward reference list checking of the included studies. We extracted information on use cases, methods and tools applied, used datasets and performance of the sentiment analysis approach. Of 1,200 citations retrieved, 29 unique studies were included in the review covering a period of 8 years. Most studies apply general domain tools (e.g. TextBlob) and sentiment lexicons (e.g. SentiWordNet) for realizing use cases such as prediction of clinical outcomes; others proposed new domain-specific sentiment analysis approaches based on machine learning. Accuracy values between 71.5-88.2% are reported. Data used for evaluation and test are often retrieved from MIMIC databases or i2b2 challenges. Latest developments related to artificial neural networks are not yet fully considered in this domain. We conclude that future research should focus on developing a gold standard sentiment lexicon, adapted to the specific characteristics of clinical narratives. Efforts have to be made to either augment existing or create new high-quality labeled data sets of clinical narratives. Last, the suitability of state-of-the-art machine learning methods for natural language processing and in particular transformer-based models should be investigated for their application for sentiment analysis of clinical narratives