In this paper, we focus on online reviews and employ artificial intelligence tools, taken from the cognitive computing field, to help understand the relationships between the textual part of the review and the assigned numerical score. We move from the intuitions that (1) a set of textual reviews expressing different sentiments may feature the same score (and vice-versa), and (2) detecting and analyzing the mismatches between the review content and the actual score may benefit both service providers and consumers, by highlighting specific factors of satisfaction (and dissatisfaction) in texts. To prove the intuitions, we adopt sentiment analysis techniques and we concentrate on hotel reviews, to find polarity mismatches therein. In particular, we first train a text classifier with a set of annotated hotel reviews, taken from the Booking website. Then, we analyze a large dataset, with around 160k hotel reviews collected from TripAdvisor, with the aim of detecting a polarity mismatch, indicating if the textual content of the review is in line, or not, with the associated score. Using well-established artificial intelligence techniques and analyzing in depth the reviews featuring a mismatch between the text polarity and the score, we find that—on a scale of five stars—those reviews ranked with middle scores include a mixture of positive and negative aspects. The approach proposed here, beside acting as a polarity detector, provides an effective selection of reviews—on an initial very large dataset—that may allow both consumers and providers to focus directly on the review subset featuring a text score disagreement,which conveniently convey to the user a summary of positive and negative features of the review target.
@cite_31: 
@cite_26: Opinion mining (OM) is a recent subdiscipline at the crossroads of information retrieval and computational linguistics which is concerned not with the topic a document is about, but with the opinion it expresses. OM has a rich set of applications, ranging from tracking users’ opinions about products or about political candidates as expressed in online forums, to customer relationship management. In order to aid the extraction of opinions from text, recent research has tried to automatically determine the “PN-polarity” of subjective terms, i.e. identify whether a term that is a marker of opinionated content has a positive or a negative connotation. Research on determining whether a term is indeed a marker of opinionated content (a subjective term) or not (an objective term) has been, instead, much more scarce. In this work we describe SENTIWORDNET, a lexical resource in which each WORDNET synset s is associated to three numerical scoresObj(s), Pos(s) and Neg(s), describing how objective, positive, and negative the terms contained in the synset are. The method used to develop SENTIWORDNET is based on the quantitative analysis of the glosses associated to synsets, and on the use of the resulting vectorial term representations for semi-supervised synset classification. The three scores are derived by combining the results produced by a committee of eight ternary classifiers, all characterized by similar accuracy levels but different classification behaviour. SENTIWORDNET is freely available for research purposes, and is endowed with a Web-based graphical user interface.
@cite_6: This volume presents a knowledge-based approach to concept-level sentiment analysis at the crossroads between affective computing, information extraction, and common-sense computing, which exploits both computer and social sciences to better interpret and process information on the Web. Concept-level sentiment analysis goes beyond a mere word-level analysis of text in order to enable a more efficient passage from (unstructured) textual information to (structured) machine-processable data, in potentially any domain. Readers will discover the following key novelties, that make this approach so unique and avant-garde, being reviewed and discussed: Sentic Computing's multi-disciplinary approach to sentiment analysis-evidenced by the concomitant use of AI, linguistics and psychology for knowledge representation and inference Sentic Computings shift from syntax to semantics-enabled by the adoption of the bag-of-concepts model instead of simply counting word co-occurrence frequencies in text Sentic Computing's shift from statistics to linguistics-implemented by allowing sentiments to flow from concept to concept based on the dependency relation between clauses This volume is the first in the Series Socio-Affective Computing edited byDr Amir Hussain and Dr Erik Cambria and will be of interest to researchers in the fields of socially intelligent, affective and multimodal human-machine interaction and systems.
@cite_2: We propose a supervised model for expanding an opinion lexicon for Twitter.We combine automatically annotated tweets with existing hand-made opinion lexicons.We use POS tags and associations between words and sentiment as word-level features.Expanded words are mapped to a positive, negative, and neutral distribution.We outperform the performance obtained by using PMI semantic orientation alone. Opinion lexicons, which are lists of terms labeled by sentiment, are widely used resources to support automatic sentiment analysis of textual passages. However, existing resources of this type exhibit some limitations when applied to social media messages such as tweets (posts in Twitter), because they are unable to capture the diversity of informal expressions commonly found in this type of media.In this article, we present a method that combines information from automatically annotated tweets and existing hand-made opinion lexicons to expand an opinion lexicon in a supervised fashion. The expanded lexicon contains part-of-speech (POS) disambiguated entries with a probability distribution for positive, negative, and neutral polarity classes, similarly to SentiWordNet.To obtain this distribution using machine learning, we propose word-level attributes based on (a) the morphological information conveyed by POS tags and (b) associations between words and the sentiment expressed in the tweets that contain them. We consider tweets with both hard and soft sentiment labels. The sentiment associations are modeled in two different ways: using point-wise-mutual-information semantic orientation (PMI-SO), and using stochastic gradient descent semantic orientation (SGD-SO), which learns a linear relationship between words and sentiment. The training dataset is labeled by a seed lexicon formed by combining multiple hand-annotated lexicons.Our experimental results show that our method outperforms the three-dimensional word-level polarity classification performance obtained by using PMI-SO alone. This is significant because PMI-SO is a state-of-the-art measure for establishing world-level sentiment. Additionally, we show that lexicons created with our method achieve significant improvements over SentiWordNet for classifying tweets into polarity classes, and also outperform SentiStrength in the majority of the experiments.
@cite_46: Sentiment analysis and opinion mining is the field of study that analyzes people's opinions, sentiments, evaluations, attitudes, and emotions from written language. It is one of the most active research areas in natural language processing and is also widely studied in data mining, Web mining, and text mining. In fact, this research has spread outside of computer science to the management sciences and social sciences due to its importance to business and society as a whole. The growing importance of sentiment analysis coincides with the growth of social media such as reviews, forum discussions, blogs, micro-blogs, Twitter, and social networks. For the first time in human history, we now have a huge volume of opinionated data recorded in digital form for analysis. Sentiment analysis systems are being applied in almost every business and social domain because opinions are central to almost all human activities and are key influencers of our behaviors. Our beliefs and perceptions of reality, and the choices we make, are largely conditioned on how others see and evaluate the world. For this reason, when we need to make a decision we often seek out the opinions of others. This is true not only for individuals but also for organizations. This book is a comprehensive introductory and survey text. It covers all important topics and the latest developments in the field with over 400 references. It is suitable for students, researchers and practitioners who are interested in social media analysis in general and sentiment analysis in particular. Lecturers can readily use it in class for courses on natural language processing, social media analysis, text mining, and data mining. Lecture slides are also available online.
@cite_25: Understanding emotions is an important aspect of personal development and growth, and as such it is a key tile for the emulation of human intelligence. Besides being important for the advancement of AI, emotion processing is also important for the closely related task of polarity detection. The opportunity to automatically capture the general public's sentiments about social events, political movements, marketing campaigns, and product preferences has raised interest in both the scientific community, for the exciting open challenges, and the business world, for the remarkable fallouts in marketing and financial market prediction. This has led to the emerging fields of affective computing and sentiment analysis, which leverage human-computer interaction, information retrieval, and multimodal signal processing for distilling people's sentiments from the ever-growing amount of online social data.
Polarity detection techniques fall under the wide umbrella of sentiment analysis @cite_46 @cite_25 . Several approaches have been proposed in the literature for polarity detection. A significant branch rely on lexicon-based features, due to the availability of lexical resources for sentiment analysis, such as, e.g., the lexicons SenticNet, SentiWordNet and a Twitter opinion lexicon, proposed in @cite_31 @cite_6 @cite_26 @cite_2 , respectively. Usually, lexicon-based approaches involve the extraction of term polarities from the sentiment lexicons and the aggregation of the single polarities to predict the overall sentiment of a piece of text.