Generating a non-English subjectivity lexicon: relations that matter

Abstract

We describe a method for creating a non-English subjectivity lexicon based on an English lexicon, an online translation service and a general purpose thesaurus: Wordnet. We use a PageRank-like algorithm to bootstrap from the translation of the English lexicon and rank the words in the thesaurus by polarity using the network of lexical relations in Wordnet. We apply our method to the Dutch language. The best results are achieved when using synonymy and antonymy relations only, and ranking positive and negative words simultaneously. Our method achieves an accuracy of 0.82 at the top 3,000 negative words, and 0.62 at the top 3,000 positive words