Entity-Specific Sentiment Classification of Yahoo News Comments

Sentiment classification is widely used for product reviews and in online social media such as forums, Twitter, and blogs. However, the problem of classifying the sentiment of user comments on news sites has not been addressed yet. News sites cover a wide range of domains including politics, sports, technology, and entertainment, in contrast to other online social sites such as forums and review sites, which are specific to a particular domain. A user associated with a news site is likely to post comments on diverse topics (e.g., politics, smartphones, and sports) or diverse entities (e.g., Obama, iPhone, or Google). Classifying the sentiment of users tied to various entities may help obtain a holistic view of their personality, which could be useful in applications such as online advertising, content personalization, and political campaign planning. In this paper, we formulate the problem of entity-specific sentiment classification of comments posted on news articles in Yahoo News and propose novel features that are specific to news comments. Experimental results show that our models outperform state-of-the-art baselines

ArSentD-LEV: A Multi-Topic Corpus for Target-based Sentiment Analysis in Arabic Levantine Tweets

Sentiment analysis is a highly subjective and challenging task. Its complexity further increases when applied to the Arabic language, mainly because of the large variety of dialects that are unstandardized and widely used in the Web, especially in social media. While many datasets have been released to train sentiment classifiers in Arabic, most of these datasets contain shallow annotation, only marking the sentiment of the text unit, as a word, a sentence or a document. In this paper, we present the Arabic Sentiment Twitter Dataset for the Levantine dialect (ArSenTD-LEV). Based on findings from analyzing tweets from the Levant region, we created a dataset of 4,000 tweets with the following annotations: the overall sentiment of the tweet, the target to which the sentiment was expressed, how the sentiment was expressed, and the topic of the tweet. Results confirm the importance of these annotations at improving the performance of a baseline sentiment classifier. They also confirm the gap of training in a certain domain, and testing in another domain.Comment: Corpus development, Levantine tweets, multi-topic, sentiment analysis, sentiment target, LREC-2018, OSACT-201