Extracting semantic orientations of words using spin model

Abstract

We propose a method for extracting semantic orientations of words: desirable or undesirable. Regarding semantic orientations as spins of electrons, we use the mean field approximation to compute the approximate probability function of the system instead of the intractable actual probability function. We also propose a criterion for parameter selection on the basis of magnetization. Given only a small number of seed words, the proposed method extracts semantic orientations with high accuracy in the experiments on English lexicon. The result is comparable to the best value ever reported.