Sentiment intensity prediction using neural word embeddings

Sentiment analysis is central to the process of mining opinions and attitudes from online texts. While much attention has been paid to the sentiment classification problem, much less work has tried to tackle the problem of predicting the intensity of the sentiment. The go to method is VADER --- an unsupervised lexicon based approach to scoring sentiment. However, such approaches are limited because of the vocabulary mismatch problem. In this paper, we present in detail and evaluate our AWESSOME framework (A Word Embedding Sentiment Scorer Of Many Emotions) for sentiment intensity scoring, that capitalizes on pre-existing lexicons, does not require training and provides fine grained and accurate sentiment intensity scores of words, phrases and text. In our experiments, we used seven Sentiment Collections to evaluate the proposed approach, against lexicon based approaches (e.g., VADER), and supervised methods such as deep learning based approaches (e.g., SentiBERT). The results show that despite not surpassing supervised approaches, the AWESSOME unsupervised approach significantly outperforms existing lexicon approaches and therefore provides a simple and effective approach for sentiment analysis. The AWESSOME framework can be flexibly adapted to cater for different seed lexicons and different neural word embeddings models in order to produce corpus specific lexicons -- without the need for extensive supervised learning or retraining

Econometrics meets sentiment : an overview of methodology and applications

The advent of massive amounts of textual, audio, and visual data has spurred the development of econometric methodology to transform qualitative sentiment data into quantitative sentiment variables, and to use those variables in an econometric analysis of the relationships between sentiment and other variables. We survey this emerging research field and refer to it as sentometrics, which is a portmanteau of sentiment and econometrics. We provide a synthesis of the relevant methodological approaches, illustrate with empirical results, and discuss useful software

A study on text-score disagreement in online reviews

In this paper, we focus on online reviews and employ artificial intelligence tools, taken from the cognitive computing field, to help understanding the relationships between the textual part of the review and the assigned numerical score. We move from the intuitions that 1) a set of textual reviews expressing different sentiments may feature the same score (and vice-versa); and 2) detecting and analyzing the mismatches between the review content and the actual score may benefit both service providers and consumers, by highlighting specific factors of satisfaction (and dissatisfaction) in texts. To prove the intuitions, we adopt sentiment analysis techniques and we concentrate on hotel reviews, to find polarity mismatches therein. In particular, we first train a text classifier with a set of annotated hotel reviews, taken from the Booking website. Then, we analyze a large dataset, with around 160k hotel reviews collected from Tripadvisor, with the aim of detecting a polarity mismatch, indicating if the textual content of the review is in line, or not, with the associated score. Using well established artificial intelligence techniques and analyzing in depth the reviews featuring a mismatch between the text polarity and the score, we find that -on a scale of five stars- those reviews ranked with middle scores include a mixture of positive and negative aspects. The approach proposed here, beside acting as a polarity detector, provides an effective selection of reviews -on an initial very large dataset- that may allow both consumers and providers to focus directly on the review subset featuring a text/score disagreement, which conveniently convey to the user a summary of positive and negative features of the review target.Comment: This is the accepted version of the paper. The final version will be published in the Journal of Cognitive Computation, available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12559-017-9496-