UNSUPERVISED TARGETED SENTIMENT ANALYSIS USING DEPENDENCY PARSING AND LINGUISTIC HEURISTICS

摘要

Sentiment analysis is targeted toward a specific subject of interest (or selected subjects) in a passage of natural language text. A dependency tree is generated for the passage, and subtrees are found that have sentiment polarities which contribute to the subject(s) of interest. A targeted sentiment score is computed for the subject(s) of interest based on sentiment expressed in those subtrees. Consecutively occurring nouns in the passage are collapsed into a noun phrase, as are possessives with ensuing nouns. The sentiment expressed in a given subtree can be modified using various linguistic heuristics. For example, sentiment polarity which is modified by a negation word may be inverted, sentiment polarity which is modified by an intensifying word may be increased, or sentiment polarity which is modified by a diluting word may be decreased.