Leveraging Web 2.0 data for scalable semi-supervised learning of domain-specific sentiment lexicons

Since manually constructing domain-specific sentiment lexicons is extremely time consuming and it may not even be feasible for domains where linguistic expertise is not available, research on automatic construction of domain-specific sentiment lexicons has become a hot topic in recent years. The main contribution of this paper is the illustration of a novel semi-supervised learning method which exploits both term-to-term and document-to-term relations hidden in a corpus for the construction of domain-specific sentiment lexicons. More specifically, the proposed two-pass pseudo labeling method combines shallow linguistic parsing and corpus-base statistical learning to make domain-specific sentiment extraction scalable with respect to the sheer volume of opinionated documents archived on the Internet these days. Our experiments show that the proposed method can generate high quality domain-specific sentiment lexicons according to users' evaluation. © 2011 ACM.