Cross-Linguistic Sentiment Analysis: From English to Spanish

The results indicate that, although languageindependent methods provide a decent baseline performance, there is also a significant cost to automation, and thus the best path to long-term improvement is through the inclusion of language-specific knowledge and resources.

Abstract

We explore the adaptation of English resources and techniques for text sentiment analysis to a new language, Spanish. Our main focus is the modification of an existing English semantic orientation calculator and the building of dictionaries; however we also compare alternate approaches, including machine translation and Support Vector Machine classification. The results indicate that, although languageindependent methods provide a decent baseline performance, there is also a significant cost to automation, and thus the best path to long-term improvement is through the inclusion of language-specific knowledge and resources. 1.