Sentiment Analysis: An Overview from Linguistics

Sentiment analysis is a growing field at the intersection of linguistics and computer science that attempts to automatically determine the sentiment contained in text. Sentiment can be characterized as positive or negative evaluation expressed through language. Common applications of sentiment analysis include the automatic determination of whether a review posted online (of a movie, a book, or a consumer product) is positive or negative toward the item being reviewed. Sentiment analysis is now a common tool in the repertoire of social media analysis carried out by companies, marketers, and political analysts. Research on sentiment analysis extracts information from positive and negative words in text, from the context of those words, and from the linguistic structure of the text. This brief review examines in particular the contributions that linguistic knowledge can make to the task of automatically determining sentiment.