Sentiment Flow – A General Model of Web Review Argumentation

Web reviews have been intensively studied in argumentation-related tasks such as sen-timent analysis. However, due to their fo-cus on content-based features, many sen-timent analysis approaches are effective only for reviews from those domains they have been specifically modeled for. This paper puts its focus on domain indepen-dence and asks whether a general model can be found for how people argue in web reviews. Our hypothesis is that people ex-press their global sentiment on a topic with similar sequences of local sentiment inde-pendent of the domain. We model such sentiment flow robustly under uncertainty through abstraction. To test our hypoth-esis, we predict global sentiment based on sentiment flow. In systematic experiments, we improve over the domain independence of strong baselines. Our findings suggest that sentiment flow qualifies as a general model of web review argumentation.