A Negation Handling Technique for Sentiment Analysis

Traditional lexicon-based approaches for sentiment analysis are usually not able to model negation, as they do not provide proper techniques to identify the right negation window. In this work we address the problem of the automatic determination of the scope of negation and we present a negation handling algorithm based on dependency-based parse trees. The proposal is based on the use of grammatical relations among words to model a sentence, and hence to determine words that are affected by negation. The proposed algorithm has been coupled with a semantic disambiguation technique to identify the sentiment of a sentence. Experiments on different datasets have proven that our proposal improves the accuracy of the sentiment analysis. The proposed algorithm has been implemented as part of a Social Information Discovery system, which allows for an integrated near-real-time analysis of discussions from multiple social networks.