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Unsupervised classification of sentiment and objectivity in Chinese text

OPAL (Open@LaTrobe) (La Trobe University)Published 1 January 2008Open access
Taras Zagibalov, John M. Carroll
Citations79

TL;DR

Novel unsupervised techniques are used, including a one-word 'seed' vocabulary and iterative retraining for sentiment processing, and a criterion of 'sentiment density' for determining the extent to which a document is opinionated.

Abstract

We address the problem of sentiment and objectivity classification of product reviews in Chinese. Our approach is distinctive in that it treats both positive / negative sentiment and subjectivity / objectivity not as distinct classes but rather as a continuum; we argue that this is desirable from the perspective of would-be customers who read the reviews. We use novel unsupervised techniques, including a one-word 'seed' vocabulary and iterative retraining for sentiment processing, and a criterion of 'sentiment density' for determining the extent to which a document is opinionated. The classifier achieves up to 87% F-measure for sentiment polarity detection.

Keywords

Computer Science