The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown: Morphosyllabic Sentiment Tagging of Unseen Words

The omnipresence of unknown words is a problem that any NLP component needs to address in some form. While there exist many established techniques for dealing with unknown words in the realm of POS-tagging, for example, guessing unknown words' semantic properties is a less-explored area with greater challenges. In this paper, we study the semantic field of sentiment and propose five methods for assigning prior sentiment polarities to unknown words based on known sentiment carriers. Tested on 2000 cases, the methods mirror human judgements closely in three- and twoway polarity classification tasks, and reach accuracies above 63% and 81%, respectively.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Karo Moilanen, Stephen G. Pulman
• Keywords: ACL 2008, Computational Linguistics, Prior Sentiment Polarities, Sentiment Carriers, Unknown Words