Sentiment Analysis of French Movie Reviews

In sentiment analysis of reviews we focus on classifying the polarity (positive, negative) of conveyed opinions from the perspective of textual evidence. Most of the work in the field has been intensively applied on the English language and only few experiments have explored other languages. In this paper, we present a supervised classification of French movie reviews where sentiment analysis is based on some shallow linguistic features such as POS tagging, chunking and simple negation forms. In order to improve classification, we extracted word semantic orientation from the lexical resource SentiWordNet. Since SentiWordNet is an English resource, we apply a word-translation from French to English before polarity extraction. Our approach is evaluated using French movie reviews. Obtained results showed that shallow linguistic features has significantly improved the classification performance with respect to the bag of words baseline.