The Importance of Pronouns to Sentiment Analysis: Online Cancer Survivor Network Case Study

Online health communities are a major source for patients and their informal caregivers in the process of gathering information and seeking social support. The Cancer Survivors Network of the American Cancer Society has many users and presents a large number of user interactions with regards to coping with cancer. Sentiment analysis is an important process in understanding members' needs and concerns and the impact of users' responses on other members. It aims to determine the participants' subjective attitude and reflect their emotions. Analyzing the sentiment of posts in online health communities enables the investigation of various factors such as what affects the sentiment change and discovery of sentiment change patterns. Since each writer has his or her own personality, and temporal emotional state, behavioral traits can be reflected in the writer's writing style. Pronouns are function-words which often convey some unique styling patterns into the texts. Drawing on a lexical approach to emotions, we conduct factor analysis on the use of pronouns in self-descriptions texts. Our analysis shows that the usage of pronouns has an effect on sentiment classification. Moreover, we evaluated the use of pronouns in our domain, and found it different than standard English usage.