Polarity analysis of texts using discourse structure

Sentiment analysis has applications in many areas and the exploration of its potential has only just begun. We propose Pathos, a framework which performs document sentiment analysis (partly) based on a document’s discourse structure. We hypothesize that by splitting a text into important and less important text spans, and by subsequently making use of this information by weighting the sentiment conveyed by distinct text spans in accordance with their importance, we can improve the performance of a sentiment classifier. A document’s discourse structure is obtained by applying Rhetorical Structure Theory on sentence level. When controlling for each considered method’s structural bias towards positive classifications, weights optimized by a genetic algorithm yield an improvement in sentiment classification accuracy and macro-level F1 score on documents of 4.5% and 4.7%, respectively, in comparison to a baseline not taking into account discourse structure.