A new ANEW: Evaluation of a word list for sentiment analysis in\n microblogs

Abstract

Sentiment analysis of microblogs such as Twitter has recently gained a fair\namount of attention. One of the simplest sentiment analysis approaches compares\nthe words of a posting against a labeled word list, where each word has been\nscored for valence, -- a 'sentiment lexicon' or 'affective word lists'. There\nexist several affective word lists, e.g., ANEW (Affective Norms for English\nWords) developed before the advent of microblogging and sentiment analysis. I\nwanted to examine how well ANEW and other word lists performs for the detection\nof sentiment strength in microblog posts in comparison with a new word list\nspecifically constructed for microblogs. I used manually labeled postings from\nTwitter scored for sentiment. Using a simple word matching I show that the new\nword list may perform better than ANEW, though not as good as the more\nelaborate approach found in SentiStrength.\n