Semi-automatic construction of a named entity dictionary for entity-based sentiment analysis in social media

摘要

To understand the user experience in social media or to facilitate the design of human-centric services by social media, users' opinions about specific entities in text messages should be captured. A fine-grained named entity recognizer (NER) is an essential module for identifying opinion targets in text messages, and a named-entity (NE) dictionary is a major resource that affects the performance of an NER. However, it is not easy to construct an NE dictionary manually, because human annotation is time-consuming and labor-intensive. To reduce construction time and labor, we propose a semi-automatic system to construct an NE dictionary from the free online resource, Wikipedia. The proposed system constructs a pseudo-document for each Wikipedia NE by using an active-learning technique. It then classifies Wikipedia entries into NE classes based on similarities between the entries and pseudo-documents located in a vector space. In experiments, the proposed system classified 92.3 % of Wikipedia entries into 29 NE classes. It showed a high performance, with a macro-averaging F1-measure of 0.872 and micro-averaging F1-measure of 0.935.