High, Medium or Low? Detecting Intensity Variation Among polar synonyms in WordNet

Raksha Sharma, Pushpak Bhattacharyya


Abstract
For fine-grained sentiment analysis, we need to go beyond zero-one polarity and find a way to compare adjectives (synonyms) that share the same sense. Choice of a word from a set of synonyms, provides a way to select the exact polarity-intensity. For example, choosing to describe a person as benevolent rather than kind1 changes the intensity of the expression. In this paper, we present a sense based lexical resource, where synonyms are assigned intensity levels, viz., high, medium and low. We show that the measure P (s|w) (probability of a sense s given the word w) can derive the intensity of a word within the sense. We observe a statistically significant positive correlation between P(s|w) and intensity of synonyms for three languages, viz., English, Marathi and Hindi. The average correlation scores are 0.47 for English, 0.56 for Marathi and 0.58 for Hindi.
Anthology ID:
2016.gwc-1.54
Volume:
Proceedings of the 8th Global WordNet Conference (GWC)
Month:
27--30 January
Year:
2016
Address:
Bucharest, Romania
Editors:
Christiane Fellbaum, Piek Vossen, Verginica Barbu Mititelu, Corina Forascu
Venue:
GWC
SIG:
SIGLEX
Publisher:
Global Wordnet Association
Note:
Pages:
389–395
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2016.gwc-1.54
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Raksha Sharma and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2016. High, Medium or Low? Detecting Intensity Variation Among polar synonyms in WordNet. In Proceedings of the 8th Global WordNet Conference (GWC), pages 389–395, Bucharest, Romania. Global Wordnet Association.
Cite (Informal):
High, Medium or Low? Detecting Intensity Variation Among polar synonyms in WordNet (Sharma & Bhattacharyya, GWC 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2016.gwc-1.54.pdf