Sentiment Flow - A General Model of Web Review Argumentation

Web reviews have been intensively studied in argumentation-related tasks such as sentiment analysis. However, due to their focus on content-based features, many sentiment analysis approaches are effective only for reviews from those domains they have been specifically modeled for. This paper puts its focus on domain independence and asks whether a general model can be found for how people argue in web reviews. Our hypothesis is that people express their global sentiment on a topic with similar sequences of local sentiment independent of the domain. We model such sentiment flow robustly under uncertainty through abstraction. To test our hypothesis, we predict global sentiment based on sentiment flow. In systematic experiments, we improve over the domain independence of strong baselines. Our findings suggest that sentiment flow qualifies as a general model of web review argumentation.