Context-Sensitive Lexicon Features for Neural Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment lexicons have been leveraged as a useful source of features for sentiment analysis models, leading to the state-of-the-art accuracies. On the other hand, most existing methods use sentiment lexicons without considering context, typically taking the count, sum of strength, or maximum sentiment scores over the whole input. We propose a context-sensitive lexicon-based method based on a simple weighted-sum model, using a recurrent neural network to learn the sentiments strength, intensification and negation of lexicon sentiments in composing the sentiment value of sentences. Results show that our model can not only learn such operation details, but also give significant improvements over state-of-the-art recurrent neural network baselines without lexical features, achieving the best results on a Twitter benchmark.