Building layered, multilingual sentiment lexicons at synset and lemma levels

Abstract

Many tasks related to sentiment analysis rely on sentiment lexicons, lexical resources containing information about the emotional implications of words (e.g., sentiment orientation of words, positive or negative). In this work, we present an automatic method for building lemma-level sentiment lexicons, which has been applied to obtain lexicons for English, Spanish and other three official languages in Spain. Our lexicons are multi-layered, allowing applications to trade off between the amount of available words and the accuracy of the estimations. Our evaluations show high accuracy values in all cases. As a previous step to the lemma-level lexicons, we have built a synset-level lexicon for English similar to SENTIWORDNET 3.0, one of the most used sentiment lexicons nowadays. We have made several improvements in the original SENTIWORDNET 3.0 building method, reflecting significantly better estimations of positivity and negativity, according to our evaluations. The resource containing all the lexicons, ML-SENTICON, is publicly available.