On Positivity Bias in Negative Reviews
This addresses a linguistic anomaly in sentiment analysis for researchers, but is incremental as it builds on known positivity bias and negation effects.
The paper investigates the presence of positive words in negative reviews, showing that they occur more frequently than negative words, and reconciles this with pragmatics of negation, where most positive words in such reviews express negative opinions.
Prior work has revealed that positive words occur more frequently than negative words in human expressions, which is typically attributed to positivity bias, a tendency for people to report positive views of reality. But what about the language used in negative reviews? Consistent with prior work, we show that English negative reviews tend to contain more positive words than negative words, using a variety of datasets. We reconcile this observation with prior findings on the pragmatics of negation, and show that negations are commonly associated with positive words in negative reviews. Furthermore, in negative reviews, the majority of sentences with positive words express negative opinions based on sentiment classifiers, indicating some form of negation.