Connotation Lexicon: A Dash of Sentiment Beneath the Surface Meaning

Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 1774–1784, Sofia, Bulgaria, August 4-9 2013. c⃝2013 Association for Computational Linguistics Connotation Lexicon: A Dash of Sentiment Beneath the Surface Meaning Song Feng Jun Seok Kang Polina Kuznetsova Yejin Choi Department of Computer Science Stony Brook University Stony Brook, NY 11794-4400 songfeng, junkang, pkuznetsova, ychoi@cs.stonybrook.edu Abstract Understanding the connotation of words plays an important role in interpreting sub- tle shades of sentiment beyond denotative or surface meaning of text, as seemingly objective statements often allude nuanced sentiment of the writer, and even purpose- fully conjure emotion from the readers’ minds. The focus of this paper is draw- ing nuanced, connotative sentiments from even those words that are objective on the surface, such as “intelligence”, “human”, and “cheesecake”. We propose induction algorithms encoding a diverse set of lin- guistic insights (semantic prosody, distri- butional similarity, semantic parallelism of coordination) and prior knowledge drawn from lexical resources, resulting in the first broad-coverage connotation lexicon. 1 Introduction There has been a substantial body of research in sentiment analysis over the last decade (Pang and Lee, 2008), where a considerable amount of work has focused on recognizing sentiment that is generally explicit and pronounced rather than im- plied and subdued. However in many real-world texts, even seemingly objective statements can be opinion-laden in that they often allude nuanced sentiment of the writer (Greene and Resnik, 2009), or purposefully conjure emotion from the readers’ minds (Mohammad and Turney, 2010). Although some researchers have explored formal and statis- tical treatments of those implicit and implied sen- timents (e.g. Wiebe et al. (2005), Esuli and Sebas- tiani (2006), Greene and Resnik (2009), Davidov et al. (2010)), automatic analysis of them largely remains as a big challenge. In this paper, we concentrate on understanding the connotative sentiments of words, as they play an important role in interpreting subtle shades of sentiment beyond denotative or surface meaning of text. For instance, consider the following: Geothermal replaces oil-heating; it helps re- ducing greenhouse emissions.1 Although this sentence could be considered as a factual statement from the general standpoint, the subtle effect of this sentence may not be entirely objective: this sentence is likely to have an influ- ence on readers’ minds in regard to their opinion toward “geothermal”. In order to sense the subtle overtone of sentiments, one needs to know that the word “emissions” has generally negative connota- tion, which geothermal reduces. In fact, depend- ing on the pragmatic contexts, it could be precisely the intention of the author to transfer his opinion into the readers’ minds. The main contribution of this paper is a broad- coverage connotation lexicon that determines the connotative polarity of even those words with ever so subtle connotation beneath their surface mean- ing, such as “Literature”, “Mediterranean”, and “wine”. Although there has been a number of previous work that constructed sentiment lexicons (e.g., Esuli and Sebastiani (2006), Wilson et al. (2005a), Kaji and Kitsuregawa (2007), Qiu et al. (2009)), which seem …

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