Exploiting Hierarchical Discourse Structure for Review Sentiment Analysis

The overall sentiment of a text is critically affected by its discourse structure. For the first time, this paper incorporates hierarchical discourse structure into an unsupervised sentiment analysis framework. Experimental results show that by integrating discourse structure, the performance of sentiment analysis is improved by 1.9% (from 85.1% to 87.0%), demonstrating the effectiveness of exploiting discourse structure for sentiment analysis.