Lexicon-based sentiment analysis of Twitter messages in Spanish

Abstract

Lexicon-Based approaches to Sentiment Analysis (SA) differ from the more common machine-learning based approaches in that the former rely solely on previously generated lexical resources that store polarity information for lexical items, which are then identified in the texts, assigned a polarity tag, and finally weighed, to come up with an overall score for the text. Such SA systems have been proved to perform on par with supervised, statistical systems, with the added benefit of not requiring a training set. However, it remains to be seen whether such lexically-motivated systems can cope equally well with extremely short texts, as generated on social networking sites, such as Twitter. In this paper we perform such an evaluation using Sentitext, a lexicon-based SA tool for Spanish. © 2013 Sociedad Española para el Procesamiento del Lenguaje.