Damping sentiment analysis in online communication: Discussions, monologs and dialogs

Abstract. Sentiment analysis programs are now sometimes used to detect patterns of sentiment use over time in online communication and to help automated systems interact better with users. Nevertheless, it seems that no previous published study has assessed whether the position of individual texts within ongoing communication can be exploited to help detect their sentiments. This article assesses apparent sentiment anomalies in on-going communication – texts assigned significantly different sentiment strength to the average of previous texts – to see whether their classification can be improved. The results suggest that a damping procedure to reduce sudden large changes in sentiment can improve classification accuracy but that the optimal procedure will depend on the type of texts processed