2012 ASE International Conference on Social Informatics (SocialInformatics 2012) / 2012 ASE International Conference on Cyber
2012
Security (CyberSecurity International
2012) Conference
/ 2012 ASE
International
Sentiment Analysis of Social Issues
Mostafa Karamibekr
Faculty of Computer Science
University of New Brunswick
Fredericton, NB, Canada
m.karami@unb.ca
Abstract—Sentiment analysis refers to a broad range of fields
of natural language processing, computational linguistics, and
text mining. Sentiment classification of reviews and comments has
emerged as the most useful application in the area of sentiment
analysis. Bag of words and feature based sentiment are the most
popular approaches used by researchers to deal with sentiment
analysis of opinions about products such as movies, electronics,
cars etc.
Up until recently most researches have been done on the
sentiment analysis of products and services. This paper focuses
on the sentiment analysis of social issues. In this paper we initially
conduct a statistical investigation on the differences between
sentiment analysis of products and social issues. Then, based on
our findings, we propose an approach to take into account the
role of verb as the most important term in expressing opinions
regarding the social issues. Statistical and experimental results
show that considering verbs not only is required and undeniable,
but also improves the performance of sentiment analysis.
Index Terms—Sentiment Analysis, Opinion Mining, Social
Issues, Sentiment Classification, Verb Oriented
I. I NTRODUCTION
Content growth in the Internet in recent years has made
a huge volume of information available. This information is
presented in different formats such as posts, news articles,
comments, and reviews. Especially in the automotive, elec-
tronics and film sectors, customers have written reviews about
products or their features. By collecting and analyzing these
reviews, new customers find others’ opinion about different
features of the product. They can compare the products to each
other to find the best one that meets their needs. Moreover,
manufacturers will find out strengths and weaknesses of their
products or those of their competitors. In this way, manufac-
turers will solve the reported problems and use the business
intelligence behind the analysis for future investments.
From the sentiment perspective, there are two kinds of
textual information, namely, facts and opinions. While facts
are the objective statements about the nature of a product,
opinions describe attitudes, appraisals, and emotions regarding
a product, service, topic, or an issue. Although the majority
of research focuses on building applications around facts, the
recent trend in the area of text mining has been focused on
building applications around opinions.
Sentiment analysis is an interdisciplinary field that crosses
natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and text
mining. Since most opinions are available in the text format
and its processing is easier than other formats, sentiment
978-0-7695-5015-2/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE
978-0-7695-4938-5/12
DOI 10.1109/SocialInformatics.2012.49
on Social
Informatics
Conference on BioMedical Computing
Ali A. Ghorbani
Faculty of Computer Science
University of New Brunswick
Fredericton, NB, Canada
ghorbani@unb.ca
analysis has emerged as a subfield of text mining [3]. It
generally recognizes opinions of people expressed in text.
The opinions could be judgments, evaluations, affective (or
emotional) states, beliefs, or wishes. Sentiment analysis ap-
peared in the literature in 1990 for the first time and then it
became a major research topic in 2000. Classifying the polarity
of a given text as positive or negative is the basic task of
sentiment analysis. Due to its many aspects it is often referred
to with different names such as opinion mining, sentiment
classification, sentiment analysis, and sentiment extraction.
It is widely believed that Sentiment analysis is needed and
useful. It is also widely accepted that extracting sentiment
from text is a hard semantic problem even for human beings.
Additionally, sentiment analysis is domain specific, therefore
the polarity of some terms depends on the context in which
they are used. For example, while “small” for “size” as a
feature in the electronic products is positive, in agricultural
products such as fruit it has a negative polarity. Sentiment
analysis is used in different domains such as shopping, en-
tertainment, politics, education, marketing, and research and
development. This paper focuses on sentiment classification in
social domains.
From the technical perspective, two main approaches for
sentiment analysis are Bag Of Words (BOW) and Feature
Based Sentiment(FBS) [8]. In the BOW approach, each doc-
ument is seen as a set of words. As a result, the syntactic
and semantic information between words are lost. The BOW
approach is not useful when opinions about products and their
features have to be analyzed. In such cases, it is required
to extract features. FBS has emerged as an approach for
analyzing the sentiments of products and their features. The
results of sentiment classification are presented in various
formats in different domains: positive/negative, like/dislike,
recommended/not-recommended, good/bad, buy / don’t buy,
excellent/boring(film), support/against [3], favorable/ unfavor-
able [10], bullish/bearish, or optimistic / pessimistic [1].
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section
2 explains sentiment analysis of social issues as well as
some previous work. Section 3 introduces our proposed verb
oriented approach for sentiment analysis of social issues. In
Section 4, we present the statistical results of our study on
the differences between social issues and products. We also
include the implementation details of the proposed method and
the evaluation of its performance for a social issue. In Section
215
5, we conclude this paper by summarizing the experimental
results and provide a number of directions for the future
research.
II. S ENTIMENT A NALYSIS OF S OCIAL I SSUES
A social issue is an issue which relates to people’s personal
lives and interactions [5]. The impact of public opinions about
social issues on policy makers operates in a similar manner
to those of customer reviews for manufacturers. Governments
and organizations who are engaged with social issues can
analyze public criticisms or supports for a particular policy
and consider public opinions in making decisions. Politicians
can receive electorates’ opinions concerning important issues
and their expectations.
Up until now, most if not all research has been focused on
products and services [7]–[9], [12], [13]. In social domains,
Somasundaran and Weibe [14] build a supervised system by
employing the sentiment and arguing opinions and their targets
as features in order to recognize the stance of debates. Tradi-
tional machine learning techniques use adjectives, adverbs, and
nouns as features to classify the sentiment polarity of a doc-
ument. There have been some attempts to improve the BOW
approach by considering more linguistic knowledge from the
lexicon, syntax, and semantics of the text. For example, verbs,
intensifiers, and diminishers affect the sentiment of a sentence.
Some linguistic techniques are used to extract the sentiment
of opinion terms, which are ambiguous or context dependent.
A. Social Issues vs Products and Services
We have supposed a hypothesis that social issues are
different from products or services. This hypothesis is the
basis of our approach and solution for sentiment analysis of
social issues. In order to show the validity of our hypothesis,
we have performed a statistical analysis on the differences
between products and social issues. We have analyzed opinions
about two products(Canon S100 and iPod) from reviews
of 9 products provided by Ding et al. [16]. We have also
collected a data-set consisting of more than 1000 comments
about abortion from CNN, ProCon.org, Yahoo Answers, and
Women’s Issues at About.com..
We have analyzed public opinions regarding products and
social issues from 3 different aspects: features of products and
social issues, explicit/implicit mentions to products and social
issues, and the distribution of various opinion terms such as
adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and verbs.
A social issue is usually connected to other issues or sub-
issues, while a product usually has features. Table I shows
some statistics about how people connect their opinion to a
product or a social issue. First, Canon S100 and iPod have
60 and 65 features, for which opinions have been expressed.
There is no feature defined for abortion in the data-set we
have collected. This table also shows that 24% and 81% of
reviews about Canon S100 mention its name and its features,
respectively. There is no mention to neither the product’s name
nor its features in only 3% of reviews about Canon S100. 65%
of iPod reviews mention its features and only 45% of reviews
216
mention its name. These statistics shows that people express
their opinions about the features of a product more than the
product itself. This situation for social issues is reverse. 28%
of comments do not contain the title of social issue which is
more than the cases (3% and 2%) for Canon S100 and iPod
respectively.
TABLE I
D ISTRIBUTION OF PRODUCT NAME , ITS FEATURES , AND SOCIAL ISSUE
Parameter Canon S100 [16] iPod [16] Abortion
# of features 60 65 -
Product/Issue 24% 45% 72%
Feature 81% 65% -
no mention 3% 2% 28%
We have found that a product usually has a given name
and some features, but this level of specificity is not always
possible for a social issue. Hence, in sentiment analysis it is
not easy to define features for social issues similar to products.
Also, in almost all the reviews about a product, there is an
indication of its name or its features, while this may not be
the case for a social issue (see Table I). This is the first major
difference between products and social issues.
We have analyzed another difference between products and
social issues statistically. People mention a product or a social
issue explicitly or implicitly(see Table II for statistics). While
Canon S100 and iPod have been implicitly mentioned 21% and
27% respectively, abortion has been mentioned 40% implicitly.
It shows that explicit mentions to social issues are less than
products because products usually have also known features
and this is not the case for social issues.
TABLE II
IMPLICIT / EXPLICIT MENTIONS TO THE PRODUCTS AND THE SOCIAL ISSUE
Data-set Explicit Mentions Implicit Mentions
Canan S100 [16] 79% 21%
iPod [16] 73% 27%
Abortion(Ours) 60% 40%
Table II shows that in 40% of the cases of social issues,
opinions are expressed implicitly. In our view, this is an
indication to the fact that it is not easy to define features for
social issues. Moreover, when opinions expressed implicitly,
it is difficult to associate them to respective social issues.
People express their opinions regarding social issues and
products by using various styles of writing or speeches. They
use various types of opinion terms. For example, people use
adjectives, adverbs, and nouns to convey their attitudes towards
a product or a feature, whereas to discuss a social issue,
verbs are more descriptive and useful. Table III provides some
statistics about the distribution of adjectives, adverbs, nouns,
and verbs in the reviews and comments expressing opinions
about Canon S100, iPod, and Abortion.
 TABLE III
D ISTRIBUTION OF THE USAGE OF VARIOUS OPINION TERMS
Parameter Canon S100 [16] iPod [16] Abortion
Num of Comments 110 160 100
Num of Opinions 276 411 222
Usage of Adjectives 62% 52% 33%
Usage of Adverbs 17% 20% 11%
Usage of Nouns 5% 7% 9%
Usage of Verbs 16% 21% 47%
As it can be seen adjectives are used more than other terms
in the reviews of products, while for the social issue (Abortion,
here) verbs have been used more than others.
From sentiment perspective, adjectives, adverbs, and nouns
are considered as features when machine learning techniques
are employed for sentiment analysis. Verbs not only have
sentiment and can be considered as feature, but also affects
the sentiment of other words in the sentence. Therefore, they
also play a different role than adjectives, adverbs, and nouns
in the sentiment of a subjective sentence.
The statistical results indicate that the traditional classifi-
cation techniques and feature-based sentiment analysis may
not be applicable for sentiment analysis of social issues.
Additionally, differences between products and social issues
inspired us to carry out a research on the sentiment analysis
of social issues.
B. Previous Works
Up until now, most if not all research has been done on
products [7]–[9], [12], [13]. Various supervised techniques
such as Support Vector Machine(SVM), Nave Bayes, Maxi-
mum Entropy, and unsupervised techniques [12], [15] are used
to classify the sentiment polarity of a document. Features in
supervised techniques are usually opinion terms in the form
of adjectives and adverbs. Verbs and nouns are also used in
some experiments.
Bing Liu [8] in a prototype system, called “opinion ob-
server,” focuses on the feature-based sentiment approach. Na-
sukawa et al. [10] test a sentence-level sentiment classification
to find favorable or unfavorable orientation of web pages and
articles. They use a syntax parser and an opinion dictionary
consisting of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs as the
source of sentiments.
In the social domain, Somasundaran and Weibe [14] build
a supervised system by employing the sentiment and arguing
opinions and their targets as features in order to recognize the
stance of debates.
III. V ERB O RIENTED S ENTIMENT A NALYSIS
In section 2, we validated our hypothesis statistically and
concluded that verbs are used more than adjectives, adverbs,
and nouns in expressing opinions regarding social issues.
Moreover, from linguistics perspective, verbs play an impor-
tant role in the semantics of a sentence. For example, in the
sentences “I believe it’s the woman’s choice,” and “I agree
217
abortion must end,” verbs “believe”, “agree”, and “end” de-
termine the sentiment orientation regarding “abortion”. If the
role of verb is not considered in the sentiment of a sentence,
its sentiment may not be recognized as accurate. For example,
in the sentence “I completely agree that abortion is a terrible
idea,” the cumulative sentiment of opinion terms(“agree” and
“terrible”) is neutral while the sentence is actually negative (or
against abortion). As it can be seen, there is no other opinion
terms such as adjectives and adverbs in the first and second
sentences.
A verb asserts something about the subject of a sentence and
expresses action, event, or state of being. There are different
classifications of verb from different aspects. From the tran-
sitivity/valency perspective, a verb is impersonal, transitive,
intransitive, or ditransitive. From sentiment perspective, a verb
may have sentiment or not. Verbs such as “like”, “agree”, and
“hate” have sentiment and verbs like “eat” and “go” do not
have sentiment. We call the verbs which have sentiment as
“opinion verbs”. An opinion verb has positive, negative, or
neutral polarity. Verbs like “is”, “are”, and “am” are called
“To-be” verbs. They do not have any sentiment but they affects
the sentiment of a sentence.
In a subjective sentence, an opinion verb either directs
sentiment to the subject and object or transfers sentiment
between them. In the sentence “I hate abortion,” “hate” is a
negative verb that directs its negativity to “abortion”. The verb
“is” in the sentence “its murder,” transfers the negativity of
“murder” to “it(abortion).” “To-be” verbs transfer sentiments
between their syntactical arguments such as subjects and
objects.
We have proposed a method which focuses on the role of
verb and its importance in sentiment analysis of social issues.
Although we have focused on opinion verbs to recognize the
actual sentiment polarity of sentences regarding social issues,
we also have considered adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and verbs
as opinion terms.
A. Opinion Dictionaries
We have employed the lexical knowledge to extract the
opinion terms from a sentence. Since we have focused on
the verb as the main opinion term, we have constructed an
opinion verb dictionary, which consists 440 opinion verbs. We
have collected these opinion verbs through a bootstrapping
process using an English dictionary [4] and its synonyms
in the WordNet [2]. The transitivity, sentiment polarity, and
the strength of opinion verbs are defined for each verb in
the dictionary. Transitivity determines whether the verb is
transitive, intransitive, or both. Sentiment polarity determines
positivity or negativity of the verb. We have assigned the
strength of 1, 2, or 3 to each opinion verb. As two examples
of opinion verbs, “agree” is a positive and transitive verb with
the strength of 2 and “hate” is a negative opinion verb with
the strength of -3, which can be transitive or intransitive. The
verbs such as “like” and “love” have similar orientations with
different strengths.
 Opinion adjectives, adverbs, and nouns are studied as the
features for sentiment classification by other researchers in this
field. We have provided a dictionary of 1726 opinion terms
through a bootstrapping process in available lists of opinion
terms provided by [15], [16] in addition to various website. For
each opinion term, we have considered its polarity (positive or
negative) and its strength. We have assigned a value between
-2 to 2 to the strength of each opinion term. “good”, “bad”,
“excellent”, “poor”, “sad”, and “happy” are some examples of
opinion terms in our dictionary.
B. Opinion Structure
A subjective sentence contains one or more opinions re-
garding a social issue. We have defined opinion structure
as a structure to keep an opinion. An opinion structure is
constructed by identifying an opinion verb as its core in the
sentence. Fig 1 shows the elements of an opinion structure. Fig. 2. Architecture of the proposed solution

sum of the sentiments of sentences as the whole sentiment of

the document.

Fig. 1. Opinion Structure elements 

We have employed the Stanford POS tagger [6] to recognize
the elements of s sentence and then fill the constructed opinion
structure. We have also considered the verb negation because
it affects the sentiment of opinion structure regarding a social
issue. Various linguistic heuristics are used to fill the elements
of opinion structure. For example, “don’t”/“doesn’t” before a
verb or “not”/“n’t” after a verb means that the sentiment of
verb has to be reversed. In other words, if the verb is positive,
its sentiment will be negative and similar for the opposite case.
C. Sentiment Model
Sentiment analysis is performed at the document level,
sentence level, and phrase/term level. Our goal is to analyze
and classify the whole sentiment of a document regarding a
social issue, but our verb oriented approach works on the
sentence and opinion levels. We have added the level of
opinion because from sentiment perspective, a sentence may
contain one or more opinions. We have designed a system
which carries out the processes in 3 levels of document,
sentence, and opinion. Fig 2 shows the related processes in
each level of analysis.
We have defined the sentiment model to formulate the rela-
tions between sentiments in the levels of document, sentence,
and opinion. Sentiment model determines how to combine
sentiments of sentences and calculate the sentiment of a
document. It also shows how to calculate the sentiment of
a sentence based on those of extracted opinions.
A document is a collection of sentences, D =
{s1 , s2 , ..., sn }. The sentiment of a document depends on the
sentiments of its sentences. In this paper, we have used the
SD := SSi , (1)
i
where SSi represents the sentiment of sentence Si . From
the sentiment perspective, a subjective sentence contains one
or more opinions. Let S = {O1 , O2 , ..., On } represents a
subjective sentence. We have assigned the sum of sentiment
values of extracted opinion structures as the sentiment of the
sentence.

Ss := OOi , (2)
i
where OOi represents opinion orientation of ith opinion
structure regarding the social issue.
D. Implementation
We have implemented our proposed approach for
sentiment classification as the most popular application of
sentiment analysis. We have designed and implemented
some algorithms to extract opinions, construct corresponding
opinion structures, and finally calculate the sentiment of
opinion structures regarding the social issue. The sentiment
of a given text is calculated by carrying out the algorithm 1.

218
Algorithm 1 Sentiment computation of a document
1: Split the document into sentences.
2: Extract the opinions from each sentence by recognizing
the opinion verbs.
3: Construct an opinion structure for each opinion and fill its
elements by using the Stanford POS Tagger [6].
4: Determine the sentiment orientation of each opinion struc-
ture regarding the social issue.
5: Calculate the sentiment of each sentence using Eq. 2.
6: Calculate the sentiment of each document using Eq. 1.
7: Classify the document into positive or negative.
The opinions expressed in a sentence are extracted (step
2) and then filled (step 3) in a constructed opinion structure
by running the algorithm 2 which employs lexical and syntax
analysis.
Algorithm 2 Extracting and filling an opinion structure
1: Run the POS tagger to recognize all the verbs, nouns,
adjectives, and adverbs.
2: Determine the main verbs.(there are various kinds of verbs
such as gerund, imperatives ,...)
3: Construct an opinion structure for the each opinion verb
that is recognized.
4: Find the subject of recognized verb. (Usually the noun
before the verb is the subject, but there are some cases
that are considered here.)
5: Find the objects of recognized verb. (if the verb is tran-
sitive, it has the direct object, otherwise it has indirect
object.)
6: Find the opinion adverbs by using the dictionary of
opinion terms that are provided.
7: Fill all the recognized elements in the constructed opinion
structure.
The most complex part in algorithm 2 is how to determine
the sentiment polarity of an opinion structure regarding the
issue (step 4 of algorithm 1). Algorithm 3 determines the
polarity of an opinion structure. It employs two opinion
dictionaries that we have provided.
We have defined some heuristics to determine the flow of
sentiment in the constructed opinion structure in step 3 of
algorithm 3. For example, “To-be” verb transfers the sentiment
between its arguments(subject and indirect object).
In Step 4 of algorithm 3, we have defined and employed
some heuristics to determine the sentiment orientation of
constructed opinion structure regarding the social issue. For
example, the sentence “its murder” has a “To-be” verb with a
negative indirect object, therefore, the “To-be” verb transfers
the negativity of indirect object (“murder”) to the subject
(“it”). Since “abortion” as the social issue is close to the sub-
ject, the sentiment orientation of constructed opinion structure
for this sentence regarding “abortion” is negative. As another
219
Algorithm 3 Sentiment calculation of an opinion structure
1: Calculate the sentiments of subject, direct object, indirect
object, and adverbs.
2: Determine which element of opinion structure is closest
to the social issue.
1) The social issue is defined and represented by a
group of words.
2) Similar words in the representative group of social
issue and the elements of opinion structure are
determined.
3: Based on the sentiment aspect of the verb(come from
the opinion verb dictionary), determine whether the verb
transfers or directs sentiment between/into subject and
objects.
4: Determine the sentiment orientation regarding the issue by
using the results of the above steps.
example, in the sentence “I hate the abortion,” the verb “hate”
is a negative verb that propagates its negativity to its direct
object in Step 3. So in Step 4, the sentiment orientation of this
sentence regarding “abortion” is negative because this social
issue (“abortion”) is close to the direct object.
IV. E XPERIMENTAL E VALUATION
Our goal is to study the sentiment analysis of social issues.
We have carried out our work in two steps. First, we have
studied the differences between products and social issues
from sentiment perspective. Second, we have implemented our
proposed method for sentiment classification as the most popu-
lar application of sentiment analysis. We have collected a data-
set consisting of more than 1000 comments, which express
public opinions regarding “abortion” from CNN, ProCon.org,
Yahoo Answers, and Women’s Issues at About.com.
In the first step, we have conducted a statistical investigation
to find out the differences between social issues and products.
We have analyzed our data-set as well as the reviews about
two products of Canon S100 and iPod provided by Ding et
al. [16]. We have compared 3 characteristics of social issues
and products statistically. The first characteristic determines
the nature of products and social issues. While products (here
Canon S100 and iPod) have 60 and 65 features respectively,
there is no similar defined feature for the social issue (here
abortion). More than 97% and 98% of reviews ( [16]) mention
at least the product or its features while only 72% of comments
mention the social issue(abortion). It means that in sentiment
analysis we can not define features for social issues similar to
products.
Second, people mention the name or features of a product
explicitly more than the title of social issue when they express
their opinion. Table II shows us while 79% and 73% of
reviews express opinions regarding Canon S100 and iPod
explicitly, only 60% of comments contain abortion or a related
word. These statistics indicate that finding the relationships
between opinions and social issues is more complicated than
the case for products and services. Moreover, the reviews,
which implicitly mention the products or their features, contain
some domain-specific adjectives that are used to find related
features. For example, “small” is an adjective for the “size”
as a feature of Canon S100.
Third, we have studied the distribution of opinion terms
used by people to express their opinions in two data-sets of
products and abortion. Table III shows that 62% and 52% of
opinions regarding Canon S100 and iPod use adjectives, while
47% of opinions regarding abortion use verbs and only 33% of
them use adjectives. Therefore, verbs are more affective than
adjectives in expressing opinions regarding social issues.
The result statistics have convinced us to trust our hypoth-
esis which considers the verb as the key element in sentiment
analysis of social issues. Our hypothesis indicates that the tra-
ditional classification techniques and feature-based sentiment
analysis may not be applicable for sentiment analysis of social
issues.
In the second step, we have proposed a verb oriented method
for sentiment analysis of social issues. We have implemented
the proposed method for sentiment classification as an applica-
tion of sentiment analysis. We have labeled each comment as
-2, -1, 1, or 2 representing strongly negative, negative, positive,
or strongly positive, respectively. The dataset consists of 588
positive and 428 negative comments. We have also developed
the BOW approach considering adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and
verbs as features.
We have considered precision and accuracy to evaluate
the performance of our proposed approach. Nashkawa [10]
believes that precision is more important than recall in many
applications of sentiment analysis because the user does not
have to read all the original documents to verify the results.
The accuracy of our proposed method is 65%, which is 10%
better than the BOW approach. The precision and recall are
71% and 80% respectively. The accuracy for strongly positive
and strongly negative documents is 67%. Table IV shows the
result of our proposed method and some previous work.
TABLE IV
T HE RESULT OF OUR METHOD VS OTHERS
Method Domain Accuracy
Turney [15] Automobile 84%
Pulse [9] Car 62.5%
Turney [15] Movies 66%
Pang [11] Movies 72-82%
Somasundaran [14] Social Issue 62.5%
Our Method Social Issue 65%
Somasundaran and Wiebe [14] reported an accuracy of
63.93% for recognizing the stance of debates from social
domain, while the accuracy of our proposed verb oriented
method on a social issue is slightly higher, 65%. Comparing
our results with those of previous works in the domain of
products may not be useful but our results are promising
and somehow comparable. For example, the accuracy of our
220
method on a social issue is 65% whereas the accuracy of Pulse
[9] on car models is 62.5%.
V. C ONCLUSION AND F UTURE W ORKS
Sentiment analysis, as an interdisciplinary field that crosses
natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and text
mining, recognizes opinions of people regarding a product,
service, object, or social issues expressed in a given text. Up
until recently most if not all research in sentiment analysis
has been done on the products and services. Public opinions
regarding social issues are so important for government and
generally who involve in the process of making decisions. This
paper has focused on sentiment analysis of social issues.
We have carried out our works in two steps. First, we
have conducted a statistical study on the differences between
products and services and social issues. Our statistical analysis
shows that social issues are different from products and
services because it is not easy to define features for social
issues as the case for products and services. Moreover, while
in the domain of products and services, adjectives are more
descriptive, in the social domains verbs are more useful
to express opinions. We have concluded that the traditional
classification techniques and feature-based sentiment analysis
may not be applicable for sentiment analysis of social issues.
Second, we have proposed a method for sentiment analysis
of social issues. It extracts the opinions from each sentence,
constructs correspondence opinion structures, and then de-
termines their orientations regarding the social issue. Our
method have focused on verbs as the core element of opinion
structures. We have implemented and evaluated our method as
well as the BOW approach to classify the sentiment orientation
of comments regarding a social issue. Our method performs
the classification 10% better than the BOW approach. The
average accuracy of our approach is 65%, which is slightly
higher than some previous work.
For future work, we will work on our method to improve the
accuracy. First, we have used the Stanford POS tagger [6] to
recognize the verbs and other elements of opinion structures.
POS tagger defines various kinds of verbs, which are not useful
for our method. We will work on the extraction of main verbs
of sentences in the future work.
Second, our dictionaries of opinion terms and opinion verbs
do not cover all the opinion terms. We will enrich our
dictionaries. Third, we also plan to enrich the algorithm to
determine the sentiment of an opinion structure with regards
to the social issue. Using synonyms and antonyms of terms in
opinion structures and the title of social issue will be the first
attempt.
Forth, from sentiment perspective, some sentences in the
document are ambiguous. A sentence may affects the senti-
ment of the previous or next sentences. It means that the senti-
ment model is more complex than the model we have defined
in this paper. We plan to work more on the disambiguating
the sentiments of ambiguous sentences and also define a new
sentiment model. Finally, we will perform more experimental
analysis in other social issues.
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