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臺大管理論叢
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Based upon the ‘diction’ formula, optimism is defined as “language endorsing some
person, group, concept or event or highlighting their positive entailments”, whilst the
diction formula for net optimism, which is the difference between ‘optimism’ and
‘pessimism’ (Demers and Vega, 2014). Taking into consideration the fact that there are no
specific words for ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism’ in Chinese documents, we translate the
classification of sentiment and collect the related sentiment words.
15
Semantic orientation is one method used in the field of linguistic analysis. Table 3,
which presents the rules for the identification of semantic orientation, shows that
S
0
indicates an optimistic state,
S
1
indicates a pessimistic state and
S
2
indicates a neutral state.
The news content can be dissected into individual words using the segmentation system,
with each word then being compared with the optimistic, pessimistic and negative
adjective terms and accordingly assigned symbols of ‘+’, ‘–’, or ‘~’. Words that are not
included within the optimism, pessimism and negative terms may be classified as neutral
words and assigned the ‘?’ symbol. For example, where a sentence from a news report
includes the terms ‘
因此
(?)’, ‘
不
(~)’, ‘
受
(?)’, ‘
缺工
(–)’, and
影響
(?)’, the state is
defined as ‘neutral’, ‘negative adjective’, ‘neutral’, ‘pessimistic’, and ‘neutral’. We then
denote the final state of the sentence using the rules on semantic orientation shown in
Table 3.
Table 3 Semantic Orientation Rules
State
Inputs
+
–
~
?
S
0
S
0
S
1
S
1
S
0
S
1
S
1
S
0
S
0
S
1
S
2
S
0
S
1
S
1
S
2
Note: S
0
refers to a state of optimism, S
1
refers to a state of pessimism, and S
2
refers to a neutral
state. ‘+’ indicates optimistic vocabulary, ‘–’ indicates pessimistic vocabulary, ‘~’ indicates
negative adjective vocabulary, and ‘?’ indicates neutral vocabulary.
15 The related sentiment words include 1,675 optimism characteristic terms, 1,770 pessimism
characteristic terms, and 15 negative adjective terms. For example, “
優勢
(advantage)”, “
成功
(success)”, and “
獲利
(profit)” are optimism characteristic terms; “
破產
(bankruptcy)”, “
危機
(crisis)”, “
衰退
(decline)”, and are pessimism characteristic terms; “
未必
(unlikely)”, “
不
(not)”, and
“
勿
(don’t)” are negative adjective terms. A complete list of special terms in each group is available
from the authors upon request or via the invention patent (Taiwan Patent No. I477987, 2015).