Multi-lingual support for lexicon-based sentiment analysis guided by semantics

• We explore the expansion of lexicon-based sentiment analysis from English to Dutch.
• We map sentiment from an English lexicon to a new one for Dutch through semantics.
• Our method significantly outperforms machine translation approaches.
• Language-specific lexicon creation has potential as well, if large seed sets exist.
• Sentiment not only relates to word meanings, but also has language-specific aspects.

Many sentiment analysis methods rely on sentiment lexicons, containing words and their associated sentiment, and are tailored to one specific language. Yet, the ever-growing amount of data in different languages on the Web renders multi-lingual support increasingly important. In this paper, we assess various methods for supporting an additional target language in lexicon-based sentiment analysis. As a baseline, we automatically translate text into a reference language for which a sentiment lexicon is available, and subsequently analyze the translated text. Second, we consider mapping sentiment scores from a semantically enabled sentiment lexicon in the reference language to a new target sentiment lexicon, by traversing relations between language-specific semantic lexicons. Last, we consider creating a target sentiment lexicon by propagating sentiment of seed words in a semantic lexicon for the target language. When extending sentiment analysis from English to Dutch, mapping sentiment across languages by exploiting relations between semantic lexicons yields a significant performance improvement over the baseline of about 29% in terms of accuracy and macro-level F1 on our data. Propagating sentiment in language-specific semantic lexicons can outperform the baseline by up to about 47%, depending on the seed set of sentiment-carrying words. This indicates that sentiment is not only linked to word meanings, but tends to have a language-specific dimension as well.