Sentiment analysis tools should take account of the number of exclamation marks!!!

Teh, Phoey Lee and Rayson, Paul Edward and Pak, Irina and Piao, Scott Songlin (2015) Sentiment analysis tools should take account of the number of exclamation marks!!! In: iiWAS '15 Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services :. ACM, BEL. ISBN 9781450334914

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Abstract

There are various factors that affect the sentiment level expressed in textual comments. Capitalization of letters tends to mark something for attention and repeating of letters tends to strengthen the emotion. Emoticons are used to help visualize facial expressions which can affect understanding of text. In this paper, we show the effect of the number of exclamation marks used, via testing with twelve online sentiment tools. We present opinions gathered from 500 respondents towards “like” and “dislike” values, with a varying number of exclamation marks. Results show that only 20% of the online sentiment tools tested considered the number of exclamation marks in their returned scores. However, results from our human raters show that the more exclamation marks used for positive comments, the more they have higher “like” values than the same comments with fewer exclamations marks. Similarly, adding more exclamation marks for negative comments, results in a higher “dislike”.