Methods for Creating Semantic Orientation Dictionaries

Maite Taboada, Caroline Anthony, Kimberly Voll


Abstract
We describe and compare different methods for creating a dictionary of words with their corresponding semantic orientation (SO). We tested how well different dictionaries helped determine the SO of entire texts. To extract SO for each individual word, we used a common method based on pointwise mutual information. Mutual information between a set of seed words and the target words was calculated using two different methods: a NEAR search on the search engine Altavista (since discontinued); an AND search on Google. These two dictionaries were tested against a manually annotated dictionary of positive and negative words. The results show that all three methods are quite close, and none of them performs particularly well. We discuss possible further avenues for research, and also point out some potential problems in calculating pointwise mutual information using Google.
Anthology ID:
L06-1250
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06)
Month:
May
Year:
2006
Address:
Genoa, Italy
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Aldo Gangemi, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2006/pdf/420_pdf.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Maite Taboada, Caroline Anthony, and Kimberly Voll. 2006. Methods for Creating Semantic Orientation Dictionaries. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06), Genoa, Italy. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Methods for Creating Semantic Orientation Dictionaries (Taboada et al., LREC 2006)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2006/pdf/420_pdf.pdf