Two Thumbs Up! Sentiment Analysis in Film Reviews

Abstract

In the past few years, the rise of digital humanities has opened up many new ways of analyzing texts. These changes may herald a brave new world, but the digitization of humanities research must be approached with caution. Nevertheless, recent developments have enabled humanities researchers to automatically detect and process several elusive speech acts, such as sarcasm and sentiment shifters. The swift progress may mean an increase in accuracy of automatic classification - or it may not. A research on classifying film reviews conducted in 2002 can be repeated with today's technology, but many new advancements in the field are still out of reach of ordinary researchers.