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The Importance of Pronouns to Sentiment Analysis: Online Cancer Survivor Network Case Study

Published: 18 May 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Online health communities are a major source for patients and their informal caregivers in the process of gathering information and seeking social support. The Cancer Survivors Network of the American Cancer Society has many users and presents a large number of user interactions with regards to coping with cancer. Sentiment analysis is an important process in understanding members' needs and concerns and the impact of users' responses on other members. It aims to determine the participants' subjective attitude and reflect their emotions. Analyzing the sentiment of posts in online health communities enables the investigation of various factors such as what affects the sentiment change and discovery of sentiment change patterns. Since each writer has his or her own personality, and temporal emotional state, behavioral traits can be reflected in the writer's writing style. Pronouns are function-words which often convey some unique styling patterns into the texts. Drawing on a lexical approach to emotions, we conduct factor analysis on the use of pronouns in self-descriptions texts. Our analysis shows that the usage of pronouns has an effect on sentiment classification. Moreover, we evaluated the use of pronouns in our domain, and found it different than standard English usage.

References

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Anderson, A., Huttenlocher, D., Kleinberg, J., & Leskovec, J. (2013, May). Steering user behavior with badges. In Proc. of the 22nd international conference on WWW (pp. 95--106). International WWW Conferences Steering Committee.
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Chung, C. K., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2008). Revealing dimensions of thinking in open-ended self-descriptions: An automated meaning extraction method for natural language. Journal of Research in Personality, 42, 96--132.
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Davison,K.E, & Pennebaker,J.W.(1997).Virtual narratives: Illness representations in online support groups. In K.J. Petrie & J.A. Weinman (Eds.), Perceptions of health and illness: Current research and applications (pp.463--486). Singapore: Harwood.
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Pak, A., & Paroubek, P. (2010, May). Twitter as a Corpus for Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining. In LREC.
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B. Qiu, K. Zhao, P. Mitra, D. Wu, C. Caragea, J. Yen, G. E. Greer, K. Portier. (2011) Get Online Support, Feel Better--Sentiment Analysis and Dynamics in an Online Cancer Survivor Community. In: SocialCom 2011.

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  • (2023)Sentiment Analysis for Social TextMachine Learning for Data Science Handbook10.1007/978-3-031-24628-9_35(801-831)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2023
  • (2022)The Case of Aspect in Sentiment Analysis: Seeking Attention or Co-Dependency?Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction10.3390/make40200214:2(474-487)Online publication date: 13-May-2022
  • (2020)Sentiment Analysis on Tweets for a Disease and Treatment CombinationComputational Vision and Bio-Inspired Computing10.1007/978-3-030-37218-7_134(1283-1293)Online publication date: 7-Jan-2020
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  1. The Importance of Pronouns to Sentiment Analysis: Online Cancer Survivor Network Case Study

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    WWW '15 Companion: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web
    May 2015
    1602 pages
    ISBN:9781450334730
    DOI:10.1145/2740908
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 18 May 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. behavioral traits
    2. pronouns
    3. self-descriptions
    4. sentiment analysis

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    WWW '15
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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2023)Sentiment Analysis for Social TextMachine Learning for Data Science Handbook10.1007/978-3-031-24628-9_35(801-831)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2023
    • (2022)The Case of Aspect in Sentiment Analysis: Seeking Attention or Co-Dependency?Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction10.3390/make40200214:2(474-487)Online publication date: 13-May-2022
    • (2020)Sentiment Analysis on Tweets for a Disease and Treatment CombinationComputational Vision and Bio-Inspired Computing10.1007/978-3-030-37218-7_134(1283-1293)Online publication date: 7-Jan-2020
    • (2019)A review of feature selection techniques in sentiment analysisIntelligent Data Analysis10.3233/IDA-17376323:1(159-189)Online publication date: 20-Feb-2019

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