Argumentative Insights from an Opinion Classification Task on a French Corpus

This work deals with sentiment analysis on a corpus of French product reviews. We first introduce the corpus and how it was built. Then we present the results of two classification tasks that aimed at automatically detecting positive, negative and neutral reviews by using various machine learning techniques. We focus on methods that make use of feature selection techniques. This is done in order to facilitate the interpretation of the models produced so as to get some insights on the relative importance of linguistic items for marking sentiment and opinion. We develop this topic by looking at the output of the selection processes on various classes of lexical items and providing an explanation of the selection in argumentative terms.