Grammatical structures for word-level sentiment detection

Asad Sayeed1,  Jordan Boyd-Graber2,  Bryan Rusk2,  Amy Weinberg2
1Saarland University, 2University of Maryland, College Park


Abstract

Existing work in fine-grained sentiment analysis focuses on sentences and phrases but ignores the contribution of individual words and their grammatical connections. This is because of a lack of both (1) annotated data at the word level and (2) algorithms that can leverage syntactic information in a principled way. We address the first need by annotating articles from the information technology business press via crowdsourcing to provide training and testing data. To address the second need, we propose a suffix-tree data structure to represent syntactic relationships between opinion targets and words in a sentence that are opinion-bearing. We show that a factor graph derived from this data structure acquires these relationships with a small number of word-level features. We demonstrate that our supervised model performs better than baselines that ignore syntactic features and constraints.