The good, the bad and the implicit: a comprehensive approach to annotating explicit and implicit sentiment

Publication type
A1
Publication status
Published
Authors
Van de Kauter, M., Desmet, B., & Hoste, V.
Journal
LANGUAGE RESOURCES AND EVALUATION
Volume
49
Issue
3
Pagination
685-720
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
External link
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10579-015-9297-4
Download
(.pdf)
Projects
SentiFM, SubTLe
View in Biblio
(externe link)

Abstract

We present a fine-grained scheme for the annotation of polar sentiment in text, that accounts for explicit sentiment (so-called private states), as well as implicit expressions of sentiment (polar facts). Polar expressions are annotated below sentence level and classified according to their subjectivity status. Additionally, they are linked to one or more targets with a specific polar orientation and intensity. Other components of the annotation scheme include source attribution and the identification and classification of expressions that modify polarity. In previous research, little attention has been given to implicit sentiment, which represents a substantial amount of the polar expressions encountered in our data. An English and Dutch corpus of financial newswire, consisting of over 45,000 words each, was annotated using our scheme. A subset of this corpus was used to conduct an inter-annotator agreement study, which demonstrated that the proposed scheme can be used to reliably annotate explicit and implicit sentiment in real-world textual data, making the created corpora a useful resource for sentiment analysis.