LARGE-SCALE SENTIMENT ANALYSIS

• US 20120046938A1
• Filed: 06/17/2011
• Published: 02/23/2012
• Est. Priority Date: 04/24/2007
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: The Research Foundation for The State University of New York (State University of New York)
• Original Assignee: The Research Foundation for The State University of New York (State University of New York)
• Inventors: Godbole, Namrata, Skiena, Steven, Srinivasaiah, Manjunath
• Granted Patent: US 8,515,739 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 704/9
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/10 Text processing natural language analysis G06F40/20; semantic analysis G06F40/30; processing or translation of natural language G06F40/40
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/35 Discourse or dialogue representation

Abstract

A method for determining a sentiment associated with an entity includes inputting a plurality of texts associated with the entity, labeling seed words in the plurality of texts as positive or negative, determining a score estimate for the plurality of words based on the labeling, re-enumerating paths of the plurality of words and determining a number of sentiment alternations, determining a final score for the plurality of words using only paths whose number of alternations is within a threshold, converting the final scores to corresponding z-scores for each of the plurality of words, and outputting the sentiment associated with the entity.

Claims

1-7. -7. (canceled)

8. A computer readable medium embodying instructions executable by a processor to perform a method for determining a statistical sentiment associated with an entity, the method steps comprising:

inputting a plurality of texts associated with the entity;

formatting the plurality of texts;

processing the plurality of texts using a sentiment lexicon;

determining a statistical sentiment for the plurality of texts processed using the sentiment lexicon; and

outputting the statistical sentiment associated with the entity.

9. The method of claim 8, further comprising determining a sentiment index based on a rank of the statistic sentiment.

10. The method of claim 8, wherein processing the plurality of texts using the sentiment lexicon further comprises:

identifying a position of text corresponding to the entity in the text;

identifying a position of terms in the sentiment lexicon in the text;

determining a polarity measure of the entity; and

determining a subjectivity measure of the entity.

11. The method of claim 10, wherein determining the polarity measure of the entity further comprises associating positive and negative sentiment references using the terms in the sentiment lexicon with the entity.

12. The method of claim 10, wherein determining the subjectivity measure of the entity further comprises accumulating counts of the positive and negative sentiment references of the entity.

13. The method of claim 8, further comprising translating at least one text of the plurality of texts into a target language.

14. The method of claim 8, wherein the statistical sentiment is output in terms of a comparison to another entity.

15. The method of claim 14, wherein the comparison is a percentile rank.

16. The method of claim 8, further comprising identifying and eliminating duplicate texts.