Sentiment Composition of Words with Opposing Polarities

Abstract

In this paper, we explore sentiment composition in phrases that have at least one positive and at least one negative word---phrases like 'happy accident' and 'best winter break'. We compiled a dataset of such opposing polarity phrases and manually annotated them with real-valued scores of sentiment association. Using this dataset, we analyze the linguistic patterns present in opposing polarity phrases. Finally, we apply several unsupervised and supervised techniques of sentiment composition to determine their efficacy on this dataset. Our best system, which incorporates information from the phrase's constituents, their parts of speech, their sentiment association scores, and their embedding vectors, obtains an accuracy of over 80% on the opposing polarity phrases.