On the Challenges of Detecting Rude Conversational Behaviour
Table 6: Classification using Sentiment Analysis on a subset of the collected data.
['Class', '% negative', '% neutral', '% positive']
Sentiment analysis is only slightly more effective when used to score sentiments of speech with offensive or inappropriate semantic meaning as opposed to speech with raised tones or interruptions. We passed a sample of conversation transcripts from our collected dataset to the Stanford Sentiment Analysis tool which then assigned a single score to the entire transcript (recall a transcript is only worth 10 seconds of conversation, on average). Nonetheless, less than half of the transcripts with offensive or inappropriate content are assigned a negative score. Content in the non-insults category comprises phrases which may not be directly offensive from a semantic perspective, so the difference in results is not strong enough to conclude sentiment analysis is effective towards insults.