A Review and Cluster Analysis of German Polarity Resources for Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

The domain of German polarity dictionaries is heterogeneous with many small dictionaries created for different purposes and using different methods. This paper aims to map out the landscape of freely available German polarity dictionaries by clustering them to uncover similarities and shared features. We find that, although most dictionaries seem to agree in their assessment of a word’s sentiment, subsets of them form groups of interrelated dictionaries. These dependencies are in most cases an immediate reflex of how these dictionaries were designed and compiled. As a consequence, we argue that sentiment evaluation should be based on multiple and diverse sentiment resources in order to avoid error propagation and amplification of potential biases. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Computing methodologies → Cluster analysis