What is Sentiment?
...
To assemble the various views of sentiment in a project, Luminoso searches for and analyzes sentiment words, or words that convey feeling and indicate sentiment around topics. These words are often adjectives. Consider the following document:
"The food was superb, but my waiter was slow"
In this example, “superb” and “slow” are considered sentiment words, as they indicate feeling around the food and the waitstaff, respectively.
...
To calculate each document’s sentiment score, Luminoso sums individual scores for each sentiment word at the concept level, then converts that sum into a percentage.
4 -1
"The food was superb, but my waiter was slow."
In the above example, “superb” received an individual sentiment score of 4, and “slow” a score of -1. As the positive score is much stronger than the negative, the entire document will have a positive sentiment of 3, expressed as the percentage 30%. The system interprets this overall document as having a 30% chance of being positive.
...
Consider a group of 20 beer review documents, a subset of which are represented below. The phrase “dark chocolate” appears in these following four:
“The aroma is massively roasty with lots of black malts, cocoa powder, dark chocolate and espresso.”
...
“Big dark chocolate flavor, roasted malt, freshly brewed coffee, nice hint of bourbon, and an excellent vanilla extract taste.”
“Pours pitch black with a two-finger dark chocolate/coffee-colored head with excellent retention, only slowly fading into a lasting cap that coats the glass with chunky rings of soapy lacing.”
...
“Starts off with a hoppy and roasted coffee bean kick that melts away into a sweet dark chocolate and malty finish that hangs on the back of the palate, which is wonderful.”
When uploaded, the application searches for sentiment words, analyzes their usage, and determines a sentiment score for each individual document. Based on the subset of documents in which “dark chocolate” appears, there are 0 negative, 1 neutral, and 3 positive associated documents. Translated into a percentage, calculated over the total set of 20 documents, the resultant sentiment mix for “dark chocolate” would be assigned a score of 0% / 5% / 15%, or 0% negative, 5% neutral, and 15% positive.
...
Very large documents. Luminoso analyzes projects at the document level, meaning if documents contain multiple sentiment words, some sentiment terms may get buried under others. For example, consider the previous document:
4 -1
"The food was superb, but my waiter was slow."
This document has an overall positive sentiment. If multiple documents reiterate both a highly positive word such as “superb”, in conjunction with negative feedback about the waitstaff, it is possible for the sentiment surrounding the waitstaff to get buried. This type of issue manifests in large datasets such as those examining Voice of the Employee, where respondents wish to convey a general feeling of positivity around their work environments, and only a bit of criticism. The result? Positive terms mask much less frequent negative terms. This problem is usually mitigated by feature- or aspect-based sentiment, which works by assigning a sentiment score to each individual feature/aspect, not document. Feature-based sentiment is currently available in Luminoso as a solution engagement.
...
“If only the company offered a generous tuition reimbursement or a student loan assistance benefit. It would be sooo great to have assistance on student loan repayment. This would increase the level of talent and attract amazing candidates.”
This document would be scored highly positive, even though it’s clear to a human reader that the company lacks this benefit. Sentiment classification is currently unable to differentiate this tone from a direct answer.
Social nuances. Sentiment has no awareness of social nuances or norms. Consider this mobile gaming review document:
“I absolutely love this game. Only one problem. Men seem to think it is a dating site. Have to be careful about that.”
This document would be assigned a positive sentiment score, even though it expresses negative criticism that using the game’s chat functionality as a dating service is discouraging.
...