On the Impact of Seed Words on Sentiment Polarity Lexicon Induction

AbstractSentiment polarity lexicons are key resources for sentiment analysis, and researchers have invested a lot of efforts in their manual creation. However, there has been a recent shift towards automatically extracted lexicons, which are orders of magnitude larger and perform much better. These lexicons are typically mined using bootstrapping, starting from very few seed words whose polarity is given, e.g., 50-60 words, and sometimes even just 5-6. Here we demonstrate that much higher-quality lexicons can be built by starting with hundreds of words and phrases as seeds, especially when they are in-domain. Thus, we combine (i) mid-sized high-quality manually crafted lexicons as seeds and (ii) bootstrapping, in order to build large-scale lexicons.