High, Medium or Low? Detecting Intensity Variation Among polar synonyms in WordNet

For fine-grained sentiment analysis, we need to go beyond zero-one polarity and find a way to compare adjectives (synonyms) that share the same sense. Choice of a word from a set of synonyms, provides a way to select the exact polarity-intensity. For example, choosing to describe a person as benevolent rather than kind1 changes the intensity of the expression. In this paper, we present a sense based lexical resource, where synonyms are assigned intensity levels, viz., high, medium and low. We show that the measure P (s|w) (probability of a sense s given the word w) can derive the intensity of a word within the sense. We observe a statistically significant positive correlation between P(s|w) and intensity of synonyms for three languages, viz., English, Marathi and Hindi. The average correlation scores are 0.47 for English, 0.56 for Marathi and 0.58 for Hindi.