The Role of Adverbs in Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment Analysis, an important area of Natural Language Understanding, often relies on the assumption that lexemes carry inherent sentiment values, as reflected in specialized resources. We examine and measure the contribution that eight intensifying adverbs make to the sentiment value of sentences, as judged by human annotators. Our results show, first, that the intensifying adverbs are not themselves sentiment-laden but strengthen the sentiment conveyed by words in their contexts to different degrees. We consider the consequences for appropriate modifications of the representation of the adverbs in sentiment lexicons.