In this paper, we evaluate a new sentiment lexicon for Danish, the Danish Sentiment Lexicon (DSL), to gain input regarding how to carry out the final adjustments of the lexicon. A feature of the lexicon that differentiates it from other sentiment resources for Danish is that it is linked to a large number of other Danish lexical resources via the DDO lemma and sense inventory and the LLOD via the Danish wordnet, DanNet. We perform our evaluation on four datasets labeled with sentiments. In addition, we compare the lexicon against two existing benchmarks for Danish: the Afinn and the Sentida resources. We observe that DSL performs mostly comparably to the existing resources, but that more fine-grained explorations need to be done in order to fully exploit its possibilities given its linking properties.

This paper presents the process of compiling a model-agnostic similarity goal standard for evaluating Danish word embeddings based on human judgments made by 42 native speakers of Danish. Word embeddings resemble semantic similarity solely by distribution (meaning that word vectors do not reflect relatedness as differing from similarity), and we argue that this generalization poses a problem in most intrinsic evaluation scenarios. In order to be able to evaluate on both dimensions, our human-generated dataset is therefore designed to reflect the distinction between relatedness and similarity. The goal standard is applied for evaluating the “goodness” of six existing word embedding models for Danish, and it is discussed how a relatively low correlation can be explained by the fact that semantic similarity is substantially more challenging to model than relatedness, and that there seems to be a need for future human judgments to measure similarity in full context and along more than a single spectrum.