An Evaluation of Lexicon-based Sentiment Analysis Techniques for the Plays of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Thomas Schmidt, Manuel Burghardt


Abstract
We present results from a project in the research area of sentiment analysis of drama texts, more concretely the plays of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. We conducted an annotation study to create a gold standard for a systematic evaluation. The gold standard consists of 200 speeches of Lessing’s plays manually annotated with sentiment information. We explore the performance of different German sentiment lexicons and processing configurations like lemmatization, the extension of lexicons with historical linguistic variants or stop words elimination to explore the influence of these parameters and find best practices for our domain of application. The best performing configuration accomplishes an accuracy of 70%. We discuss the problems and challenges for sentiment analysis in this area and describe our next steps toward further research.
Anthology ID:
W18-4516
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature
Month:
August
Year:
2018
Address:
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Editors:
Beatrice Alex, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Anna Feldman, Anna Kazantseva, Nils Reiter, Stan Szpakowicz
Venue:
LaTeCH
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
139–149
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-4516
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Thomas Schmidt and Manuel Burghardt. 2018. An Evaluation of Lexicon-based Sentiment Analysis Techniques for the Plays of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. In Proceedings of the Second Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature, pages 139–149, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
An Evaluation of Lexicon-based Sentiment Analysis Techniques for the Plays of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Schmidt & Burghardt, LaTeCH 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-4516.pdf