The Effect of Negators, Modals, and Degree Adverbson Sentiment Composition
Table 2: The impact of different modifier groups on sentiment. ‘Avg. diff.’ is the average difference between the score of mod w and w. ‘# pairs‘ is the number of pairs (of w and mod w) used to determine the average. ‘# score ↑ (↓)‘ indicates the number of phrases for which score(mod w) is greater (less) than score(w) by at least 0.069 (the perceptible difference).
['[BOLD] Modifier Group', '[BOLD] On positive words Avg. diff.', '[BOLD] On positive words # pairs', '[BOLD] On positive words # score ↑', '[BOLD] On positive words # score ↓', '[BOLD] On negative words Avg. diff.', '[BOLD] On negative words # pairs', '[BOLD] On negative words # score ↑', '[BOLD] On negative words # score ↓']
SCL-NMA contains many phrases formed by different types of modifiers—negators, modals, and degree adverbs. Thus, this lexicon is a good resource for studying the impact of these types of modifiers on sentiment. In the following, we compare the sentiment score of single-word term w with the sentiment score for phrase mod w, where mod is a modifier from a particular group (negator, modal, or degree adverb). The columns show the average change in sentiment score between w and mod w, the number of pairs (of w and mod w) used to determine the average, the number of phrases mod w whose sentiment score is greater (↑) or less (↓) than the score of w by at least 0.069 (the least perceptible difference). Since the impact of modifiers can be different depending on the sentiment of the modified word w, we present separate analyses for when w is positive and when w is negative. For the analysis in this section only, a word is considered positive if it has a sentiment score greater than or equal to 0.3, and considered negative if its sentiment score is less than or equal to -0.3.