Polarity lexicon for the polish language: Design and extension with random walk algorithm

Abstract

Sentiment analysis aims at an automatic assignment to a portion of text a value expressing an emotional attitude towards its content. Out of numerous efficient methods for investigating sentiment, the authors decided to opt for the lexicon-based approach. A necessary prerequisite for adopting it was the availability of specific lexical resources for the investigated language. While there are substantial readily accessible polarity resources for English, those for Polish are meagre and, to the best of our knowledge, none of them is able to fully support sentiment analysis. Accordingly, the main objective of the presented work is to plug this gap in academic research by creating in an automated manner, a polarity lexical resource for the Polish language. In this paper, we present the motivation for the study and the key mechanisms underlying the development of the polarity lexicon, elucidate the linguistic phenomena to be reckoned with in the process, as well as discuss the random walk algorithm used to extend the obtained polarity resources. Finally, the results of the conducted experiments and the newly compiled polarity lexicon are demonstrated.