Identifying praise or criticism with sentiment orientation

The evaluative character of a word is called its semantic orientation. Positive semantic orientation indicates praise (for example, honest, intrepid) and negative semantic orientation indicates criticism (for example, disturbing, superfluous). Semantic orientation varies in both direction (positive or negative) and degree (mild to strong). An automated system for measuring semantic orientation will have its application in text classification, text filtering, tracking opinions in online discussions, analysis of survey responses, and automated chat systems (chatbots).

Semantic Orientation (SO) is used to determine whether a particular phrase is praising or criticizing someone or something. Turney and Littman proposed an algorithm for determining that using SO.

If the SO of the phrase is positive then the phrase is thought to have a positive sentiment; in other words, the phrase is said to be praising. Otherwise, if the SO value of the...