Happy Accident: A Sentiment Composition Lexicon for Opposing Polarity Phrases

Sentiment composition is the determining of sentiment of a multi-word linguistic unit, such as a phrase or a sentence, based on its constituents. We focus on sentiment composition in phrases formed by at least one positive and at least one negative word ― phrases like {`}happy accident{'} and {`}best winter break{'}. We refer to such phrases as opposing polarity phrases. We manually annotate a collection of opposing polarity phrases and their constituent single words with real-valued sentiment intensity scores using a method known as Best―Worst Scaling. We show that the obtained annotations are consistent. We explore the entries in the lexicon for linguistic regularities that govern sentiment composition in opposing polarity phrases. Finally, we list the current and possible future applications of the lexicon.