Analyzing Sentiment in a Large Set of Web Data While Accounting for Negation

As virtual utterances of opinions or sentiment are becoming increasingly abundant on the Web, automated ways of analyzing sentiment in such data are becoming more and more urgent. In this paper, we provide a classification scheme for existing approaches to document sentiment analysis. As the role of negations in sentiment analysis has been explored only to a limited extent, we additionally investigate the impact of taking into account negation when analyzing sentiment. To this end, we utilize a basic sentiment analysis framework – consisting of a wordbank creation part and a document scoring part – taking into account negation. Our experimental results show that by accounting for negation, precision on human ratings increases with 1.17%. On a subset of selected documents containing negated words, precision increases with 2.23%.