Creating a General Russian Sentiment Lexicon

The paper describes the new Russian sentiment lexicon RuSentiLex. The lexicon was gathered from several sources: opinionated words from domain-oriented Russian sentiment vocabularies, slang and curse words extracted from Twitter, objective words with positive or negative connotations from a news collection. The words in the lexicon having different sentiment orientations in specific senses are linked to appropriate concepts of the thesaurus of Russian language RuThes. All lexicon entries are classified according to four sentiment categories and three sources of sentiment (opinion, emotion, or fact). The lexicon can serve as the first version for the construction of domain-specific sentiment lexicons or be used for feature generation in machine-learning approaches. In this role, the RuSentiLex lexicon was utilized by the participants of the SentiRuEval-2016 Twitter reputation monitoring shared task and allowed them to achieve high results.