How universal are universal dependencies? Exploiting syntax for multilingual clause-level sentiment detection

Abstract

This paper investigates clause-level sentiment detection in a multilingual scenario. Aiming at a high-precision, fine-grained, configurable, and non-biased system for practical use cases, we have designed a pipeline method that makes the most of syntactic structures based on Universal Dependencies, avoiding machine-learning approaches that may cause obstacles to our purposes. We achieved high precision in sentiment detection for 17 languages and identified the advantages of common syntactic structures as well as issues stemming from structural differences on Universal Dependencies. In addition to reusable tips for handling multilingual syntax, we provide a parallel benchmarking data set for further research.