Defining a Gold Standard for a Swedish Sentiment Lexicon: Towards Higher-Yield Text Mining in the Digital Humanities

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 from scratch of a gold standard for the sentiment annotation of Swedish terms as a first step towards the creation of a full-fledged sentiment lexicon for Swedish.