Towards debugging sentiment lexicons

Abstract

Central to many sentiment analysis tasks are sentiment lexicons (SLs). SLs exhibit polarity inconsistencies. Previous work studied the problem of checking the consistency of an SL for the case when the entries have categorical labels (positive, negative or neutral) and showed that it is NPhard. In this paper, we address the more general problem, in which polarity tags take the form of a continuous distribution in the interval [0, 1]. We show that this problem is polynomial. We develop a general framework for addressing the consistency problem using linear programming (LP) theory. LP tools allow us to uncover inconsistencies efficiently, paving the way to building SL debugging tools. We show that previous work corresponds to 0-1 integer programming, a particular case of LP. Our experimental studies show a strong correlation between polarity consistency in SLs and the accuracy of sentiment tagging in practice.