Twitter as a Source for Time- and Domain-Dependent Sentiment Lexicons

Sentiment lexicons are an essential component on most state-of-the-art sentiment analysis methods. However, the terms included are usually restricted to verbs and adjectives because they (1) usually have similar meanings among different domains and (2) are the main indicators of subjectivity in the text. This can lead to a problem in the classification of short informal texts since sometimes the absence of these types of parts of speech does not mean an absence of sentiment. Therefore, our hypothesis states that knowledge of terms regarding certain events and respective sentiment (public opinion) can improve the task of sentiment analysis. Consequently, to complement traditional sentiment dictionaries, we present a system for lexicon expansion that extracts the most relevant terms from news and assesses their positive or negative score through Twitter. Preliminary results on a labelled dataset show that our complementary lexicons increase the performance of three state-of-the-art sentiment systems, therefore proving the effectiveness of our approach.