Extracting Semantic Orientations of Phrases from Dictionary

We propose a method for extracting semantic orientations of phrases (pairs of an adjective and a noun): positive, negative, or neutral. Given an adjective, the semantic orientation classification of phrases can be reduced to the classification of words. We construct a lexical network by connecting similar/related words. In the network, each node has one of the three orientation values and the neighboring nodes tend to have the same value. We adopt the Potts model for the probability model of the lexical network. For each adjective, we estimate the states of the nodes, which indicate the semantic orientations of the adjective-noun pairs. Unlike existing methods for phrase classification, the proposed method can classify phrases consisting of unseen words. We also propose to use unlabeled data for a seed set of probability computation. Empirical evaluation shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.