Measuring the Effect of Discourse Structure on Sentiment Analysis

The aim of this paper is twofold: measuring the effect of discourse structure when assessing the overall opinion of a document and analyzing to what extent these effects depend on the corpus genre. Using Segmented Discourse Representation Theory as our formal framework, we propose several strategies to compute the overall rating. Our results show that discourse-based strategies lead to better scores in terms of accuracy and Pearson’s correlation than state-of-the-art approaches