Determining the Level of Clients' Dissatisfaction from Their Commentaries

Abstract

We present a study in the area of sentiment analysis of clients' commentaries transcribed by assistants of a help-desk service of one Portuguese telecommunications company. We have adopted a lexicon-based approach to determine the polarity of the sentiment of each commentary, based on the so called opinion words. This task was by no means easy, as not many tools are available for the Portuguese language. The initial results with the off-the-shelf solutions were rather poor. This has motivated us to carry out a number of enhancements, including, for instance, enriching the given lexicon with domain specific terms, formulating specific rules for negation and amplifiers. Automatic pruning of some of the lexicon terms has led to a significant improvement in performance. As our final system achieved a very good performance, our work should be of interest to others working on domain specific solutions for languages where ready-made solutions are not available.