The good, the bad and the implicit: annotating polarity

Abstract

Most of the existing sentiment annotation schemes focus on the identification of subjective statements, which explicitly express an evaluation of a certain target. Subjective statements are particularly common in user-generated content such as user reviews or blogs. However, we find that these annotation schemes are insufficient for capturing all occurrences of sentiment, which is often expressed in an implicit way. This is true especially in factual text types such as newswire, where explicit sentiment expressions are rare. We therefore propose a new annotation scheme for the fine-grained analysis of explicit as well as implicit expressions of positive and negative sentiment, also called polar expressions. This scheme was applied to a corpus of economic news articles by 8 annotators. In this presentation, we discuss the annotation scheme and the results of the annotation effort, including inter annotator agreement