Abstract
Contemporary dictionary-based approaches to sentiment analysis exhibit serious validity problems when applied to specialized vocabularies, but human-coded dictionaries for such applications are often labor-intensive and inefficient to develop. We demonstrate the validity of minimally-supervised approaches for the creation of a sentiment dictionary from a corpus of text drawn from a specialized vocabulary. We demonstrate the validity of this approach in estimating sentiment from texts in a large-scale benchmarking dataset recently introduced in computational linguistics, and demonstrate the improvements in accuracy of our approach over well-known standard (nonspecialized) sentiment dictionaries. Finally, we show the usefulness of our approach in an application to the specialized language used in US federal appellate court decisions.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 20-35 |
Number of pages | 16 |
Journal | Political Science Research and Methods |
Volume | 9 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jan 2021 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Sociology and Political Science
- Political Science and International Relations