Sentiment Classification of Movie Reviews Using Contextual Valence Shifters

We present two methods for determining the sentiment expressed by a movie review. The semantic orientation of a review can be positive, negative, or neutral. We examine the effect of valence shifters on classifying the reviews. We examine three types of valence shifters: negations, intensifiers and diminishers. Negations are used to reverse the semantic polarity of a particular term, while intensifiers and diminishers are used to increase and decrease, respectively, the degree to which a term is positive or negative. The first method classifies reviews based on the number of positive and negative terms they contain. We use the General Inquirer in order to identify positive and negative terms, as well as negation terms, intensifiers, and diminishers. We also use positive and negative terms from other sources, including a dictionary of synonym differences and a very large Web corpus. To compute corpus-based semantic orientation values of terms, we use their association scores with a sma...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: CI
• Authors: Alistair Kennedy, Diana Inkpen
• Keywords: CI 2006, Negative Terms, Reviews, Valence Shifter