An empirical study of sentence features for subjectivity and polarity classification

•We extend and combine the body of empirical evidence regarding sentence subjectivity and polarity classification.•We provide a comprehensive analysis of different sentence features using data from multiple benchmarks.•Our analysis suggests possible use cases of the features considered and gives insights into their potential applicability.•Some features claimed as effective in the literature have little value once the models incorporate other elemental features.

While a number of isolated studies have analysed how different sentence features are beneficial in Sentiment Analysis, a complete picture of their effectiveness is still lacking. In this paper we extend and combine the body of empirical evidence regarding sentence subjectivity classification and sentence polarity classification, and provide a comprehensive analysis of the relative importance of each set of features using data from multiple benchmarks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that evaluates a highly diversified set of sentence features for the two main sentiment classification tasks.