Sentiment analysis of conditional sentences

Abstract

This paper studies sentiment analysis of conditional sentences. The aim is to determine whether opinions expressed on different topics in a conditional sentence are positive, negative or neutral. Conditional sentences are one of the commonly used language constructs in text. In a typical document, there are around 8% of such sentences. Due to the condition clause, sentiments expressed in a conditional sentence can be hard to determine. For example, in the sentence, if your Nokia phone is not good, buy this great Samsung phone, the author is positive about "Samsung phone" but does not express an opinion on "Nokia phone" (although the owner of the "Nokia phone" may be negative about it). However, if the sentence does not have "if", the first clause is clearly negative. Although "if" commonly signifies a conditional sentence, there are many other words and constructs that can express conditions. This paper first presents a linguistic analysis of such sentences, and then builds some supervised learning models to determine if sentiments expressed on different topics in a conditional sentence are positive, negative or neutral. Experimental results on conditional sentences from 5 diverse domains are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. © 2009 ACL and AFNLP.