Sentiment Classification Using Negation as a Proxy for Negative Sentiment

We explore the relationship between negated text and negative sentiment in the task of sentiment classification. We propose a novel adjustment factor based on negation occurrences as a proxy for negative sentiment that can be applied to lexicon-based classifiers equipped with a negation detection pre-processing step. We performed an experiment on a multi-domain customer reviews dataset obtaining accuracy improvements over a baseline, and we further improved our results using out-of-domain data to calibrate the adjustment factor. We see future work possibilities in exploring negation detection refinements, and expanding the experiment to a broader spectrum of opinionated discourse, beyond that of customer reviews.