The Effect of Negators, Modals, and Degree Adverbson Sentiment Composition
Table 3: The impact of negators on sentiment.
['[BOLD] Modifier', '[BOLD] Avg. diff.', '[BOLD] # pairs', '[BOLD] # score ↑', '[BOLD] # score ↓']
Next, we investigate the effect of individual negators. The majority of the negation triggers have a large effect on both positive and negative words; the absolute difference in scores between a negated phrase and the corresponding sentiment word is 0.8-1.0 points on positive words and 0.7-0.9 points on negative words. The greatest shift in sentiment on positive words was observed for the modifier will not be, and on negative words for modifier will not. The weakest effect is caused by may not, nothing, and never. Verb tenses seem not to affect the behavior of negators significantly. For example, the average change in sentiment caused by not and by was not differs only by 0.03-0.05 points. The modal verbs will and can form strong negation phrases will not, will not be, and cannot that showed the most change in sentiment. Other modal verbs, such as could, would, and may, form negation phrases with smaller effect on sentiment.