This paper describes our system for fine-grained sentiment scoring of news headlines submitted to SemEval 2017 task 5–subtask 2. Our system uses a feature-light method that consists of a Support Vector Regression (SVR) with various kernels and word vectors as features. Our best-performing submission scored 3rd on the task out of 29 teams and 4th out of 45 submissions with a cosine score of 0.733.

We focus on the task of supervised sentiment classification of short and informal texts in Croatian, using two simple yet effective methods: word embeddings and string kernels. We investigate whether word embeddings offer any advantage over corpus- and preprocessing-free string kernels, and how these compare to bag-of-words baselines. We conduct a comparison on three different datasets, using different preprocessing methods and kernel functions. Results show that, on two out of three datasets, word embeddings outperform string kernels, which in turn outperform word and n-gram bag-of-words baselines.