Generating a Gold Standard for a Swedish Sentiment Lexicon

There is an increasing demand for multilingual sentiment analysis, and most work on sentiment lexicons is still carried out based on English lexicons like WordNet. In addition, many of the non-English sentiment lexicons that do exist have been compiled by (machine) translation from English resources, thereby arguably obscuring possible language-specific characteristics of sentiment-loaded vocabulary. In this paper we describe the creation of a gold standard for the sentiment annotation of Swedish terms as a first step towards the creation of a fullfledged sentiment lexicon for Swedish – i.e., a lexicon containing information about prior sentiment (also called polarity) values of lexical items (words or disambiguated word senses), along a scale negative–positive. We create a gold standard for sentiment annotation of Swedish terms, using the freely available SALDO lexicon and the Gigaword corpus. For this purpose, we employ a multi-stage approach combining corpus-based frequency sampling and two stages of human annotation: direct score annotation followed by Best-Worst Scaling. In addition to obtaining a gold standard, we analyze the data from our process and we draw conclusions about the optimal sentiment model.