The Detection and Analysis of Bi-polar Phrases and Polarity Conflicts

In fine-grained sentiment analysis one has to deal with the composition of bi-polar phrases such as e.g. just punishment. Moreover, the top down prediction of phrase polarity as imposed by certain verbs on their direct objects sometimes is violated by the bottom up composed phrase polarity (e.g. ’to approve war’). We introduce a fine-grained polarity lexicon built along the lines of the Appraisal Theory and we investigate the composition of bi-polar phrases both, from a phrase internal point of view and from a verb-centered perspective. We have specified a multi-lingual polarity resource (French, English, German) and a system pipeline that carries out sentiment composition for these languages. We discuss examples with reference to each of these languages.