Entity-Level Sentiment: More than the Sum of Its Parts
Egil Rønningstad, Roman Klinger, Lilja Øvrelid, Erik Velldal
Abstract
In sentiment analysis of longer texts, there may be a variety of topics discussed, of entities mentioned, and of sentiments expressed regarding each entity. We find a lack of studies exploring how such texts express their sentiment towards each entity of interest, and how these sentiments can be modelled. In order to better understand how sentiment regarding persons and organizations (each entity in our scope) is expressed in longer texts, we have collected a dataset of expert annotations where the overall sentiment regarding each entity is identified, together with the sentence-level sentiment for these entities separately. We show that the reader’s perceived sentiment regarding an entity often differs from an arithmetic aggregation of sentiments at the sentence level. Only 70% of the positive and 55% of the negative entities receive a correct overall sentiment label when we aggregate the (human-annotated) sentiment labels for the sentences where the entity is mentioned. Our dataset reveals the complexity of entity-specific sentiment in longer texts, and allows for more precise modelling and evaluation of such sentiment expressions.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.wassa-1.8
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Bangkok, Thailand
- Editors:
- Orphée De Clercq, Valentin Barriere, Jeremy Barnes, Roman Klinger, João Sedoc, Shabnam Tafreshi
- Venues:
- WASSA | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 84–96
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.wassa-1.8
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Egil Rønningstad, Roman Klinger, Lilja Øvrelid, and Erik Velldal. 2024. Entity-Level Sentiment: More than the Sum of Its Parts. In Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis, pages 84–96, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Entity-Level Sentiment: More than the Sum of Its Parts (Rønningstad et al., WASSA-WS 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_acl24_videos/2024.wassa-1.8.pdf