Towards Bootstrapping a Polarity Shifter Lexicon using Linguistic Features

Marc Schulder, Michael Wiegand, Josef Ruppenhofer, Benjamin Roth


Abstract
We present a major step towards the creation of the first high-coverage lexicon of polarity shifters. In this work, we bootstrap a lexicon of verbs by exploiting various linguistic features. Polarity shifters, such as “abandon”, are similar to negations (e.g. “not”) in that they move the polarity of a phrase towards its inverse, as in “abandon all hope”. While there exist lists of negation words, creating comprehensive lists of polarity shifters is far more challenging due to their sheer number. On a sample of manually annotated verbs we examine a variety of linguistic features for this task. Then we build a supervised classifier to increase coverage. We show that this approach drastically reduces the annotation effort while ensuring a high-precision lexicon. We also show that our acquired knowledge of verbal polarity shifters improves phrase-level sentiment analysis.
Anthology ID:
I17-1063
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
November
Year:
2017
Address:
Taipei, Taiwan
Editors:
Greg Kondrak, Taro Watanabe
Venue:
IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing
Note:
Pages:
624–633
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/I17-1063
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marc Schulder, Michael Wiegand, Josef Ruppenhofer, and Benjamin Roth. 2017. Towards Bootstrapping a Polarity Shifter Lexicon using Linguistic Features. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 624–633, Taipei, Taiwan. Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Bootstrapping a Polarity Shifter Lexicon using Linguistic Features (Schulder et al., IJCNLP 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/I17-1063.pdf
Presentation:
 I17-1063.Presentation.pdf
Data
FrameNetSST