Building a Sentiment Lexicon for Social Judgement Mining

A methodology for automatically enlarging a Portuguese sentiment lexicon for mining social judgments from text, i.e., detecting opinions on human entities, produces results at least as good as the best that have been reported for this task.

Abstract

We present a methodology for automatically enlarging a Portuguese sentiment lexicon for mining social judgments from text, i.e., detecting opinions on human entities. Starting from publicly-availabe language resources, the identification of human adjectives is performed through the combination of a linguistic-based strategy, for extracting human adjective candidates from corpora, and machine learning for filtering the human adjectives from the candidate list. We then create a graph of the synonymic relations among the human adjectives, which is built from multiple open thesauri. The graph provides distance features for training a model for polarity assignment. Our initial evaluation shows that this method produces results at least as good as the best that have been reported for this task.