Semantic sentiment analysis challenge at ESWC2017

Sentiment Analysis is a widely studied research field in both research and industry, and there are different approaches for addressing sentiment analysis related tasks. Sentiment Analysis engines implement approaches spanning from lexicon-based techniques, to machine learning, or involving syntactical rules analysis. Such systems are already evaluated in international research challenges. However, Semantic Sentiment Analysis approaches, which take into account or rely also on large semantic knowledge bases and implement Semantic Web best practices, are not under specific experimental evaluation and comparison by other international challenges. Such approaches may potentially deliver higher performance, since they are also able to analyze the implicit, semantics features associated with natural language concepts. In this paper, we present the fourth edition of the Semantic Sentiment Analysis Challenge, in which systems implementing or relying on semantic features are evaluated in a competition involving large test sets, and on different sentiment tasks. Systems merely based on syntax/word-count or just lexicon-based approaches have been excluded by the evaluation. Then, we present the results of the evaluation for each task and show the winner of the most innovative approach award, that combines several knowledge bases for addressing the sentiment analysis task