Sentiment polarity shifters : creating lexical resources through manual annotation and bootstrapped machine learning

Alleviating pain is good and abandoning hope is bad. We instinctively understand how words like "alleviate" and "abandon" affect the polarity of a phrase, inverting or weakening it. When these words are content words, such as verbs, nouns and adjectives, we refer to them as polarity shifters. Shifters are a frequent occurrence in human language and an important part of successfully modeling negation in sentiment analysis; yet research on negation modeling has focussed almost exclusively on a small handful of closed class negation words, such as "not", "no" and "without. A major reason for this is that shifters are far more lexically diverse than negation words, but no resources exist to help identify them. We seek to remedy this lack of shifter resources. Our most central step towards this is the creation of a large lexicon of polarity shifters that covers verbs, nouns and adjectives. To reduce the prohibitive cost of such a large annotation task, we develop a bootstrapping approach that combines automatic classification with human verification. This ensures the high quality of our lexicon while reducing annotation cost by over 70%. In designing the bootstrap classifier we develop a variety of features which use both existing semantic resources and linguistically informed text patterns. In addition we investigate how knowledge about polarity shifters might be shared across different parts of speech, highlighting both the potential and limitations of such an approach. The applicability of our bootstrapping approach extends beyond the creation of a single resource. We show how it can further be used to introduce polarity shifter resources for other languages. Through the example case of German we show that all our features are transferable to other languages. Keeping in mind the requirements of under-resourced languages, we also explore how well a classifier would do when relying only on data- but not resource-driven features. We also introduce ways to use cross-lingual information, leveraging the shifter resources we previously created for other languages. Apart from the general question of which words can be polarity shifters, we also explore a number of other factors. One of these is the matter of shifting directions, which indicates whether a shifter affects positive polarities, negative polarities or whether it can shift in either direction. Using a supervised classifier we add shifting direction information to our bootstrapped lexicon. For other aspects of polarity shifting, manual annotation is preferable to automatic classification. Not every word that can cause polarity shifting does so for every of its word senses. As word sense disambiguation technology is not robust enough to allow the automatic handling of such nuances, we manually create a complete sense-level annotation of verbal polarity shifters. To verify the usefulness of the lexica which we create, we provide an extrinsic evaluation in which we apply them to a sentiment analysis task. In this task the different lexica are not only compared amongst each other, but also against a state-of-the-art compositional polarity neural network classifier that has been shown to be able to implicitly learn the negating effect of negation words from a training corpus. However, we find that the same is not true for the far more lexically diverse polarity shifters. Instead, the use of the explicit knowledge provided by our shifter lexica brings clear gains in performance.Deutsche Forschungsgesellschaf

Building sentiment Lexicons applying graph theory on information from three Norwegian thesauruses

Sentiment lexicons are the most used tool to automatically predict sentiment in text. To the best of our knowledge, there exist no openly available sentiment lexicons for the Norwegian language. Thus in this paper we applied two different strategies to automatically generate sentiment lexicons for the Norwegian language. The first strategy used machine translation to translate an English sentiment lexicon to Norwegian and the other strategy used information from three different thesauruses to build several sentiment lexicons. The lexicons based on thesauruses were built using the Label propagation algorithm from graph theory. The lexicons were evaluated by classifying product and movie reviews. The results show satisfying classification performances. Different sentiment lexicons perform well on product and on movie reviews. Overall the lexicon based on machine translation performed the best, showing that linguistic resources in English can be translated to Norwegian without losing significant value

Semi-automatic approaches for exploiting shifter patterns in domain-specific sentiment analysis

This paper describes two different approaches to sentiment analysis. The first is a form of symbolic approach that exploits a sentiment lexicon together with a set of shifter patterns and rules. The sentiment lexicon includes single words (unigrams) and is developed automatically by exploiting labeled examples. The shifter patterns include intensification, attenuation/downtoning and inversion/reversal and are developed manually. The second approach exploits a deep neural network, which uses a pre-trained language model. Both approaches were applied to texts on economics and finance domains from newspapers in European Portuguese. We show that the symbolic approach achieves virtually the same performance as the deep neural network. In addition, the symbolic approach provides understandable explanations, and the acquired knowledge can be communicated to others. We release the shifter patterns to motivate future research in this direction

Multi-theme sentiment analysis with sentiment shifting

Business reviews contain rich sentiment on multiple themes, disclosing more interesting information than the overall polarities of documents. When it comes to fine-grained sentiment analysis, given any segment of text, we are not only interested in overall polarity of such segment, but also the sentiment words play major effects. However, sentiment analysis at the word level poses significant challenges due to the complexity of reviews, the inconsistency of sentiment in different themes, and the sentiment shifting resulting from linguistic patterns---contextual valence shifters. To simultaneously resolve the multi-theme and sentiment shifting dilemma, a unified explainable sentiment analysis model, MTSA, is proposed in this paper, which enables both classification of sentiment polarity and discovery of quantified sentiment-shifting patterns. MTSA formulates multi-theme sentiment by learning embeddings (i.e., vector representations) for both themes and words, and derives the shifter effect learning algorithm by modeling the shifted sentiment in a logistic regression model. Extensive experiments have been conducted on Yelp business reviews and IMDB movie reviews. The improvement of sentiment polarity classification demonstrates the effectiveness of MTSA at rectifying word feature representations of reviews, and the human evaluation shows its successful discovery of multi-theme sentiment words and automatic effect quantification of contextual valence shifters

Sentence-level sentiment tagging across different domains and genres

The demand for information about sentiment expressed in texts has stimulated a growing interest into automatic sentiment analysis in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This dissertation is motivated by an unmet need for high-performance domain-independent sentiment taggers and by pressing theoretical questions in NLP, where the exploration of limitations of specific approaches, as well as synergies between them, remain practically unaddressed. This study focuses on sentiment tagging at the sentence level and covers four genres: news, blogs, movie reviews, and product reviews. It draws comparisons between sentiment annotation at different linguistic levels (words, sentences, and texts) and highlights the key differences between supervised machine learning methods that rely on annotated corpora (corpus-based, CBA) and lexicon-based approaches (LBA) to sentiment tagging. Exploring the performance of supervised corpus-based approach to sentiment tagging, this study highlights the strong domain-dependence of the CBA. I present the development of LBA approaches based on general lexicons, such as WordNet, as a potential solution to the domain portability problem. A system for sentiment marker extraction from WordNet's relations and glosses is developed and used to acquire lists for a lexicon-based system for sentiment annotation at the sentence and text levels. It demonstrates that LBA's performance across domains is more stable than that of CBA. Finally, the study proposes an integration of LBA and CBA in an ensemble of classifiers using a precision-based voting technique that allows the ensemble system to incorporate the best features of both CBA and LBA. This combined approach outperforms both base learners and provides a promising solution to the domain-adaptation problem. The study contributes to NLP (1) by developing algorithms for automatic acquisition of sentiment-laden words from dictionary definitions; (2) by conducting a systematic study of approaches to sentiment classification and of factors affecting their performance; (3) by refining the lexicon-based approach by introducing valence shifter handling and parse tree information; and (4) by development of the combined, CBA/LBA approach that brings together the strengths of the two approaches and allows domain-adaptation with limited amounts of labeled training data

An expandable Arabic lexicon and valence shifter rules for sentiment analysis on twitter

Sentiment analysis (SA) refers as computational and natural language processing techniques used to extract subjective information expressed in a text. In this SA study, three main problems are addressed: a) absence of resources on Palestinian Arabic dialect (PAL), b) emergence of new sentiment words, hence decreases the performance of sentiment analysis models when applied on tweets collected, and c) handling valence shifter words were not thoroughly addressed in Arabic sentiment analysis. Therefore, this study aims to construct a PAL lexicon for Palestinian tweets and to design an Expandable and Up-to-date Lexicon for Arabic (EULA). A new valence shifter rules in enhancing the performance of lexicon-based sentiment analysis on Arabic tweets is also been constructed. In this study, a PAL lexicon is built by using phonology matching algorithm while EULA is constructed by harnessing a general lexicon on a tweets dataset to find new terms and predict its polarity through some linguistic rules. Furthermore, a set of rules are proposed to handle the valence shifters words by applying rules to find the scope of words, and shifting value that is produced by these words. Palestinian and Arabic tweets datasets from March to May 2018 are used to evaluate the proposed idea. Experimental results indicate that the proposed PAL lexicon has produced better results compared to other lexicons when tested on Palestinian dataset. Meanwhile, EULA enhanced the performance of lexicon-based approach to be competitive with machine learning approach. Moreover, applying the proposed valence shifter rules have increased overall performance of 5% on average. The new proposed PAL sentiment lexicon is able to handle Palestinian’s dialects. Furthermore, the EULA has overcome the emergence of new slang words in social media. Moreover, the constructed valence shifter rules are capable to handle negation, intensifiers and contrasts in enhancing the performance of Arabic sentiment analysis

A survey on author profiling, deception, and irony detection for the Arabic language

"This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: [FULL CITE], which has been published in final form at [Link to final article using the DOI]. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving."[EN] The possibility of knowing people traits on the basis of what they write is a field of growing interest named author profiling. To infer a user's gender, age, native language, language variety, or even when the user lies, simply by analyzing her texts, opens a wide range of possibilities from the point of view of security. In this paper, we review the state of the art about some of the main author profiling problems, as well as deception and irony detection, especially focusing on the Arabic language.Qatar National Research Fund, Grant/Award Number: NPRP 9-175-1-033Rosso, P.; Rangel-Pardo, FM.; Hernandez-Farias, DI.; Cagnina, L.; Zaghouani, W.; Charfi, A. (2018). A survey on author profiling, deception, and irony detection for the Arabic language. Language and Linguistics Compass. 12(4):1-20. https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12275S120124Abuhakema , G. Faraj , R. Feldman , A. Fitzpatrick , E. 2008 Annotating an arabic learner corpus for error Proceedings of The sixth international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2008Adouane , W. Dobnik , S. 2017 Identification of languages in algerian arabic multilingual documents Proceedings of The Third Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop (WANLP)Adouane , W. Semmar , N. Johansson , R 2016a Romanized berber and romanized arabic automatic language identification using machine learning Proceedings of the Third Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects; COLING 53 61Adouane , W. Semmar , N. Johansson , R. 2016b ASIREM participation at the discriminating similar languages shared task 2016 Proceedings of the Third Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects; COLING 163 169Adouane , W. Semmar , N. Johansson , R. Bobicev , V. 2016c Automatic detection of arabicized berber and arabic varieties Proceedings of the Third Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects; COLING 63 72Alfaifi , A. Atwell , E. Hedaya , I. 2014 Arabic learner corpus (ALC) v2: A new written and spoken corpus of Arabic learnersAlharbi , K. 2015 The irony volcano explodes black comedyAli , A. Bell , P. Renals , S. 2015 Automatic dialect detection in Arabic broadcast speechAlmeman , K. Lee , M. 2013 Automatic building of Arabic multi dialect text corpora by bootstrapping dialect words 1 6Aloshban , N. Al-Dossari , H. 2016 A new approach for group spam detection in social media for Arabic language (AGSD) 20 23Al-Sabbagh , R. Girju , R. 2012 YADAC: Yet another dialectal Arabic corpusAlsmearat , K. Al-Ayyoub , M. Al-Shalabi , R. 2014 An extensive study of the bag-of-words approach for gender identification of Arabic articlesAlsmearat , K. Shehab , M. Al-Ayyoub , M. Al-Shalabi , R. Kanaan , G. 2015 Emotion analysis of Arabic articles and its impact on identifying the authors genderArfath , P. Al-Badrashiny , M. Diab , M. El Kholy , A. Eskander , R. Habash , N. Pooleery , M. Rambow , O. Roth , R. M. 2014 MADAMIRA: A fast, comprehensive tool for morphological analysis and disambiguation of ArabicBarbieri , F. Basile , V. Croce , D. Nissim , M. Novielli , N. Patti , V. 2016 Overview of the Evalita 2016 sentiment polarity classification taskBarbieri , F. Saggion , H 2014 Modelling irony in twitter 56 64Barbieri , F. Saggion , H. Ronzano , F 2014 Modelling sarcasm in Twitter, a novel approachBasile , V. Bolioli , A. Nissim , M. Patti , V. Rosso , P. 2014 Overview of the Evalita 2014 sentiment polarity classification taskBlanchard, D., Tetreault, J., Higgins, D., Cahill, A., & Chodorow, M. (2013). TOEFL11: A CORPUS OF NON-NATIVE ENGLISH. ETS Research Report Series, 2013(2), i-15. doi:10.1002/j.2333-8504.2013.tb02331.xBosco, C., Patti, V., & Bolioli, A. (2013). Developing Corpora for Sentiment Analysis: The Case of Irony and Senti-TUT. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 28(2), 55-63. doi:10.1109/mis.2013.28Bouamor , H. Habash , N. Salameh , M. Zaghouani , W. Rambow , O. Abdulrahim , D. Oflazer , K. 2018 The MADAR Arabic Dialect Corpus and LexiconBouchlaghem , R. Elkhlifi , A. Faiz , R. 2014 Tunisian dialect Wordnet creation and enrichment using web resources and other Wordnets 104 113 https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/W14-3613Boujelbane , R. BenAyed , S. Belguith , L. H. 2013 Building bilingual lexicon to create dialect Tunisian corpora and adapt language modelCagnina L. Rosso , P 2015 Classification of deceptive opinions using a low dimensionality representationCavalli-Sforza , V. Saddiki , H. Bouzoubaa , K. Abouenour , L. Maamouri , M. Goshey , E. 2013 Bootstrapping a Wordnet for an Arabic dialect from other Wordnets and dictionary resourcesCotterell , R. Callison-Burch , C. 2014 A multi-dialect, multi-genre corpus of informal written ArabicDahlmeier , D. Tou Ng , H. Mei Wu , S. 2013 Building a large annotated corpus of learner English: the NUS corpus of learner English 22 31Darwish , K. Sajjad , H. Mubarak , H. 2014 Verifiably effective Arabic dialect identification 1465 1468Duh , K. Kirchhoff , K. 2006 Lexicon acquisition for dialectal Arabic using transductive learningElfardy , E. Diab , M. T. 2013 Sentence level dialect identification in Arabic 456 461Estival , D. Gaustad , T. Hutchinson , B. Bao-Pham , S. Radford , W. 2008 Author profiling for English and Arabic emailsFitzpatrick, E., Bachenko, J., & Fornaciari, T. (2015). Automatic Detection of Verbal Deception. Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies, 8(3), 1-119. doi:10.2200/s00656ed1v01y201507hlt029Franco-Salvador, M., Rangel, F., Rosso, P., Taulé, M., & Antònia Martít, M. (2015). Language Variety Identification Using Distributed Representations of Words and Documents. Experimental IR Meets Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Interaction, 28-40. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-24027-5_3Ghosh , A. Li , G. Veale , T. Rosso , P. Shutova , E. Barnden , J. Reyes , A. 2015 Semeval-2015 task 11: Sentiment analysis of figurative language in twitter 470 478Graff , D. Maamouri , M. 2012 Developing LMF-XML bilingual dictionaries for colloquial Arabic dialects 269 274Habash , N. Khalifa , S. Eryani , F. Rambow , O. Abdulrahim , D. Erdmann , A. Saddiki , H. 2018 Unified Guidelines and Resources for Arabic Dialect OrthographyHabash , N. Rambow , O. Kiraz , G. 2005 Morphological analysis and generation for Arabic dialectsHaggan, M. (1991). Spelling errors in native Arabic-speaking English majors: A comparison between remedial students and fourth year students. System, 19(1-2), 45-61. doi:10.1016/0346-251x(91)90007-cHassan , H. Daud , N. M. 2011 Corpus analysis of conjunctions: Arabic learners difficulties with collocationsHayes-Harb, R. (2006). Native Speakers of Arabic and ESL Texts: Evidence for the Transfer of Written Word Identification Processes. TESOL Quarterly, 40(2), 321. doi:10.2307/40264525Hernández-Farías, I., Benedí, J.-M., & Rosso, P. (2015). Applying Basic Features from Sentiment Analysis for Automatic Irony Detection. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 337-344. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-19390-8_38Hernández Fusilier, D., Montes-y-Gómez, M., Rosso, P., & Guzmán Cabrera, R. (2015). Detecting positive and negative deceptive opinions using PU-learning. Information Processing & Management, 51(4), 433-443. doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2014.11.001Karoui , J. Benamara , F. Moriceau , V. Aussenac-Gilles , N. Hadrich Belguith , L. 2015 Towards a contextual pragmatic model to detect irony in tweetsKaroui , J. Zitoune , F. B. Moriceau , V. 2017 SOUKHRIA: Towards an irony detection system for Arabic in social mediaLjubesic , N. Mikelic , N. Boras , D. 2007 Language identification: How to distinguish similar languagesLópez-Monroy, A. P., Montes-y-Gómez, M., Escalante, H. J., Villaseñor-Pineda, L., & Stamatatos, E. (2015). Discriminative subprofile-specific representations for author profiling in social media. Knowledge-Based Systems, 89, 134-147. doi:10.1016/j.knosys.2015.06.024Magdy, W., Darwish, K., & Weber, I. (2016). #FailedRevolutions: Using Twitter to study the antecedents of ISIS support. First Monday. doi:10.5210/fm.v21i2.6372Maier , W. Gomez-Rodriguez , C. 2014 Language variety identification in Spanish tweetsMalmasi , S. Dras , M. 2014 Arabic native language identificationMechti , S. Abbassi , A. Belguith , L. H. Faiz , R. 2016 An empirical method using features combination for Arabic native language identificationMukherjee, A., Liu, B., & Glance, N. (2012). Spotting fake reviewer groups in consumer reviews. Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web - WWW ’12. doi:10.1145/2187836.2187863Proceedings of the EMNLP’2014 Workshop on Language Technology for Closely Related Languages and Language Variants. (2014). doi:10.3115/v1/w14-42Pennebaker , J. W. Chung , C. K. Ireland , M. E. Gonzales , A. L. Booth , R. J. 2007 The development and psychometric properties of LIWC2007 http://www.liwc.net/LIWC2007LanguageManual.pdf http://liwc.netPotthast , M. Rangel , F. Tschuggnall , M. Stamatatos , E. Rosso , P. Stein , B. 2017 Overview of PAN'17 G. Jones 10456 Springer, ChamRandall M. Groom , N. 2009 The BUiD Arab learner corpus: a resource for studying the acquisition of l2 English spellingRangel , F. Rosso , P. 2015 On the multilingual and genre robustness of emographs for author profiling in social media 274 280 Springer-Verlag, LNCSRangel, F., & Rosso, P. (2016). On the impact of emotions on author profiling. Information Processing & Management, 52(1), 73-92. doi:10.1016/j.ipm.2015.06.003Rangel , F. Rosso , P. Koppel , M. Stamatatos , E. Inches , G. 2013 Overview of the author profiling task at PAN 2013 P. Forner R. Navigli D. TufisRangel , F. Rosso , P. Potthast , M. Stein , B. Daelemans , W. 2015 Overview of the 3rd author profiling task at PAN 2015 L. Cappellato N. Ferro G. Jones E. San JuanRangel , F. Rosso , P. Verhoeven , B. Daelemans , W. Potthast , M. Stein , B. 2016 Overview of the 4th author profiling task at PAN 2016: Cross-genre evaluationsRefaee , E. Rieser , V. 2014 An Arabic twitter corpus for subjectivity and sentiment analysis 2268 2273Reyes, A., Rosso, P., & Buscaldi, D. (2012). From humor recognition to irony detection: The figurative language of social media. Data & Knowledge Engineering, 74, 1-12. doi:10.1016/j.datak.2012.02.005Reyes, A., Rosso, P., & Veale, T. (2012). A multidimensional approach for detecting irony in Twitter. Language Resources and Evaluation, 47(1), 239-268. doi:10.1007/s10579-012-9196-xRosso, P., & Cagnina, L. C. (2017). Deception Detection and Opinion Spam. Socio-Affective Computing, 155-171. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-55394-8_8Saâdane , H. 2015 Traitement Automatique de L'Arabe Dialectalise: Aspects Methodologiques et AlgorithmiquesSaâdane , H. Nouvel , D. Seffih , H. Fluhr , C. 2017 Une approche linguistique pour la détection des dialectes arabesSadat , F. Kazemi , F. Farzindar , A. 2014 Automatic identification of Arabic language varieties and dialects in social mediaSadhwani , P. 2005 Phonological and orthographic knowledge: An Arab-Emirati perspectiveSchler , J. Koppel , M. Argamon , S. Pennebaker , J. W. 2006 Effects of age and gender on blogging 199 205Shoufan , A. Al-Ameri , S. 2015 Natural language processing for dialectical Arabic: A surveySoliman , T. Elmasry , M. Hedar , A-R. Doss , M. 2013 MINING SOCIAL NETWORKS' ARABIC SLANG COMMENTSSulis, E., Irazú Hernández Farías, D., Rosso, P., Patti, V., & Ruffo, G. (2016). Figurative messages and affect in Twitter: Differences between #irony, #sarcasm and #not. Knowledge-Based Systems, 108, 132-143. doi:10.1016/j.knosys.2016.05.035Tetreault , J. Blanchard , D. Cahill , A. 2013 A report on the first native language identification shared task Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications 48 57Tillmann , C. Mansour , S. Al Onaizan , Y. 2014 Improved sentence-level Arabic dialect classification Proceedings of the VarDia006C Workshop 110 119Tono, Y. (2012). International Corpus of Crosslinguistic Interlanguage: Project overview and a case study on the acquisition of new verb co-occurrence patterns. Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 27-46. doi:10.1075/tufs.4.07tonWahsheh , H. A. Al-Kabi , M. N. Alsmadi , I. M. 2013b SPAR: A system to detect spam in Arabic opinionsZaghouani , W. Charfi , A. 2018a Arap-Tweet: A Large Multi-Dialect Twitter Corpus for Gender, Age and Language Variety Identification Miyazaki, JapanZaghouani , W. Charfi , A. 2018b Guidelines and Annotation Framework for Arabic Author Profiling Miyazaki, JapanZaghouani , W. Mohit , B. Habash , N. Obeid , O. Tomeh , N. Rozovskaya , A. Farra , N. Alkuhlani , S. Oflazer , K. 2014 Large scale Arabic error annotation: Guidelines and frameworkZaghouani , W. Habash , N. Bouamor , H. Rozovskaya , A. Mohit , B. Heider , A. Oflazer , K. 2015 Correction annotation for non-native Arabic texts: Guidelines and corpus Proceedings of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Fourth Linguistic Annotation Workshop 129 139Zaidan , O. F. Callison-Burch , C 2011 The Arabic online commentary dataset: An annotated dataset of informal Arabic with high dialectal content Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: short papers -Volume 2 Association for Computational Linguistics 37 41Zaidan, O. F., & Callison-Burch, C. (2014). Arabic Dialect Identification. Computational Linguistics, 40(1), 171-202. doi:10.1162/coli_a_00169Zampieri , M. Gebre , B. G. 2012 Automatic identification of language varieties: The case of PortugueseZampieri , M. Tan , L. Ljubesic , N. Tiedemann , J. 2014 A report on the DSL shared task 2014 Proceedings of the First Workshop on Applying NLP Tools to Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects 58 67Zampieri , M. Tan , L. Ljubesic , N. Tiedemann , J. Nakov , P. 2015 Overview of the DSL shared task 2015 1Zbib , R. Malchiodi , E. Devlin , J. Stallard , D. Matsoukas , S. Schwartz , R. Makhoul , J. Zaidan , O. F. Callison Burch , C. 2012 Machine translation of Arabic dialects Proceedings of the 2012 conference of the North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human language technologies Association for Computational Linguistics 49 5