Do we really need lexical information? Towards a top-down approach to sentiment analysis of product reviews

Abstract

Most of the current approaches to sentiment analysis of product reviews are dependent on lexical sentiment information and proceed in a bottom-up way, adding new layers of features to lexical data. In this paper, we maintain that a typical product review is not a bag of sentiments, but a narrative with an underlying structure and reoccurring patterns, which allows us to predict its sentiments knowing only its general polarity and discourse cues that occur in it. We hypothesize that knowing only the review's score and its discourse patterns would allow us to accurately predict the sentiments of its individual sentences. The experiments we conducted prove this hypothesis and show a substantial improvement over the lexical baseline.