PRODUCING SENTIMENT-AWARE RESULTS FROM A SEARCH QUERY

A method, system, and computer program product for information retrieval and sentiment assessment. The method parses a sentiment-aware query to isolate one or more lexical terms to be included in a lexical retrieval of documents containing the lexical terms. The parsing of the query includes parsing the query to isolate portions of the query to be included in the configuration of a sentiment analysis of the retrieved documents. The documents retrieved based on the lexical terms are processed so as to generate a sentiment assessment, and the sentiment found in the retrieved documents might be correlated to terms that are not present in the lexical terms. The sentiment assessment is presented as a “positive” or “negative” indication, or as a sentiment assessment score. The sentiment portion of the query can specify an area of interest, and/or can specify a user-selected classifier model that is used to process the retrieved documents.