Open Domain Targeted Sentiment

Abstract

We propose a novel approach to sentiment analysis for a low resource setting. The intuition behind this work is that sentiment expressed towards an entity, targeted sentiment, may be viewed as a span of sentiment expressed across the entity. This representation allows us to model sentiment detection as a sequence tagging problem, jointly discovering people and organizations along with whether there is sentiment directed towards them. We compare performance in both Spanish and English on microblog data, using only a sentiment lexicon as an external resource. By leveraging linguisticallyinformed features within conditional random fields (CRFs) trained to minimize empirical risk, our best models in Spanish significantly outperform a strong baseline, and reach around 90% accuracy on the combined task of named entity recognition and sentiment prediction. Our models in English, trained on a much smaller dataset, are not yet statistically significant against their baselines.