The ALPIN Sentiment Dictionary: Austrian Language Polarity in Newspapers

Abstract

This paper introduces the Austrian German sentiment dictionary ALPIN to account for the lack of resources for dictionary-based sentiment analysis in this specific variety of German, which is characterized by lexical idiosyncrasies that also affect word sentiment. The proposed language resource is based on Austrian news media in the field of politics, an austriacism list based on different resources and a posting data set based on a popular Austrian news media. Different resources are used to increase the diversity of the resulting language resource. Extensive crowd-sourcing is performed followed by evaluation and automatic conversion into sentiment scores. We show that crowd-sourcing enables the creation of a sentiment dictionary for the Austrian German domain. Additionally, the different parts of the sentiment dictionary are evaluated to show their impact on the resulting resource. Furthermore, the proposed dictionary is utilized in a web application and available for future research and free to use for anyone.