"i know what you feel": Analyzing the role of conjunctions in automatic sentiment analysis

Abstract

We are interested in finding how people feel about certain topics. This could be considered as a task of classifying the sentiment: sentiment could be positive, negative or neutral. In this paper, we examine the problem of automatic sentiment analysis at sentence level. We observe that sentence structure has a fair contribution towards sentiment determination, and conjunctions play a major role in defining the sentence structure. Our assumption is that in presence of conjunctions, not all phrases have equal contribution towards overall sentiment. We compile a set of conjunction rules to determine relevant phrases for sentiment analysis. Our approach is a representation of the idea to use linguistic resources at phrase level for the analysis at sentence level. We incorporate our approach with support vector machines to conclude that linguistic analysis plays a significant role in sentiment determination. Finally, we verify our results on movie, car and book reviews. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.