Sentiment analysis on user reviews helps to keep track of user reactions towards products, and make advices to users about what to buy. State-of-the-art review-level sentiment classification techniques could give pretty good precisions of above 90 . However, current phrase-level sentiment analysis approaches might only give sentiment polarity labelling precisions of around 70 80 , which is far from satisfaction and restricts its application in many practical tasks. In this paper, we focus on the problem of phrase-level sentiment polarity labelling and attempt to bridge the gap between phrase-level and review-level sentiment analysis. We investigate the inconsistency between the numerical star ratings and the sentiment orientation of textual user reviews. Although they have long been treated as identical, which serves as a basic assumption in previous work, we find that this assumption is not necessarily true. We further propose to leverage the results of review-level sentiment classification to boost the performance of phrase-level polarity labelling using a novel constrained convex optimization framework. Besides, the framework is capable of integrating various kinds of information sources and heuristics, while giving the global optimal solution due to its convexity. Experimental results on both English and Chinese reviews show that our framework achieves high labelling precisions of up to 89 , which is a significant improvement from current approaches.
The explosion of Web opinion data has made essential the need for automatic tools to analyze and understand people's sentiments toward different topics. In most sentiment analysis applications, the sentiment lexicon plays a central role. However, it is well known that there is no universally optimal sentiment lexicon since the polarity of words is sensitive to the topic domain. Even worse, in the same domain the same word may indicate different polarities with respect to different aspects. For example, in a laptop review, "large" is negative for the battery aspect while being positive for the screen aspect. In this paper, we focus on the problem of learning a sentiment lexicon that is not only domain specific but also dependent on the aspect in context given an unlabeled opinionated text collection. We propose a novel optimization framework that provides a unified and principled way to combine different sources of information for learning such a context-dependent sentiment lexicon. Experiments on two data sets (hotel reviews and customer feedback surveys on printers) show that our approach can not only identify new sentiment words specific to the given domain but also determine the different polarities of a word depending on the aspect in context. In further quantitative evaluation, our method is proved to be effective in constructing a high quality lexicon by comparing with a human annotated gold standard. In addition, using the learned context-dependent sentiment lexicon improved the accuracy in an aspect-level sentiment classification task. An intraocular lens for implantation in an eye comprising an optic configured so that the optic can be deformed to permit the intraocular lens to be passed through an incision into the eye. A peripheral zone circumscribes the optical zone of the optic and one or more fixation members coupled to the peripheral zone and extending outwardly from the peripheral zone to retain the optic in the eye are provided. In one embodiment the fixation member or members are located so that the optical zone is free of such member or members. The peripheral zone preferably has a maximum axial thickness which is larger than the maximum axial thickness of the periphery of the optical zone. One of the important types of information on the Web is the opinions expressed in the user generated content, e.g., customer reviews of products, forum posts, and blogs. In this paper, we focus on customer reviews of products. In particular, we study the problem of determining the semantic orientations (positive, negative or neutral) of opinions expressed on product features in reviews. This problem has many applications, e.g., opinion mining, summarization and search. Most existing techniques utilize a list of opinion (bearing) words (also called opinion lexicon) for the purpose. Opinion words are words that express desirable (e.g., great, amazing, etc.) or undesirable (e.g., bad, poor, etc) states. These approaches, however, all have some major shortcomings. In this paper, we propose a holistic lexicon-based approach to solving the problem by exploiting external evidences and linguistic conventions of natural language expressions. This approach allows the system to handle opinion words that are context dependent, which cause major difficulties for existing algorithms. It also deals with many special words, phrases and language constructs which have impacts on opinions based on their linguistic patterns. It also has an effective function for aggregating multiple conflicting opinion words in a sentence. A system, called Opinion Observer, based on the proposed technique has been implemented. Experimental results using a benchmark product review data set and some additional reviews show that the proposed technique is highly effective. It outperforms existing methods significantly Merchants selling products on the Web often ask their customers to review the products that they have purchased and the associated services. As e-commerce is becoming more and more popular, the number of customer reviews that a product receives grows rapidly. For a popular product, the number of reviews can be in hundreds or even thousands. This makes it difficult for a potential customer to read them to make an informed decision on whether to purchase the product. It also makes it difficult for the manufacturer of the product to keep track and to manage customer opinions. For the manufacturer, there are additional difficulties because many merchant sites may sell the same product and the manufacturer normally produces many kinds of products. In this research, we aim to mine and to summarize all the customer reviews of a product. This summarization task is different from traditional text summarization because we only mine the features of the product on which the customers have expressed their opinions and whether the opinions are positive or negative. We do not summarize the reviews by selecting a subset or rewrite some of the original sentences from the reviews to capture the main points as in the classic text summarization. Our task is performed in three steps: (1) mining product features that have been commented on by customers; (2) identifying opinion sentences in each review and deciding whether each opinion sentence is positive or negative; (3) summarizing the results. This paper proposes several novel techniques to perform these tasks. Our experimental results using reviews of a number of products sold online demonstrate the effectiveness of the techniques. The explosion of social media services presents a great opportunity to understand the sentiment of the public via analyzing its large-scale and opinion-rich data. In social media, it is easy to amass vast quantities of unlabeled data, but very costly to obtain sentiment labels, which makes unsupervised sentiment analysis essential for various applications. It is challenging for traditional lexicon-based unsupervised methods due to the fact that expressions in social media are unstructured, informal, and fast-evolving. Emoticons and product ratings are examples of emotional signals that are associated with sentiments expressed in posts or words. Inspired by the wide availability of emotional signals in social media, we propose to study the problem of unsupervised sentiment analysis with emotional signals. In particular, we investigate whether the signals can potentially help sentiment analysis by providing a unified way to model two main categories of emotional signals, i.e., emotion indication and emotion correlation. We further incorporate the signals into an unsupervised learning framework for sentiment analysis. In the experiment, we compare the proposed framework with the state-of-the-art methods on two Twitter datasets and empirically evaluate our proposed framework to gain a deep understanding of the effects of emotional signals. This paper proposes an unsupervised lexicon building method for the detection of polar clauses, which convey positive or negative aspects in a specific domain. The lexical entries to be acquired are called polar atoms, the minimum human-understandable syntactic structures that specify the polarity of clauses. As a clue to obtain candidate polar atoms, we use context coherency, the tendency for same polarities to appear successively in contexts. Using the overall density and precision of coherency in the corpus, the statistical estimation picks up appropriate polar atoms among candidates, without any manual tuning of the threshold values. The experimental results show that the precision of polarity assignment with the automatically acquired lexicon was 94 on average, and our method is robust for corpora in diverse domains and for the size of the initial lexicon.