NEWS.md

In trinker/sentimentr: Calculate Text Polarity Sentiment

NEWS

Versioning

Releases will be numbered with the following semantic versioning format:

<major>.<minor>.<patch>

And constructed with the following guidelines:

• Breaking backward compatibility bumps the major (and resets the minor and patch)
• New additions without breaking backward compatibility bumps the minor (and resets the patch)
• Bug fixes and misc changes bumps the patch

sentimentr 2.9.1 -

BUG FIXES

NEW FEATURES

MINOR FEATURES

IMPROVEMENTS

CHANGES

sentimentr 2.8.0 - 2.9.0

BUG FIXES

• sentiment_by did not capture averaging.function for some data types (e.g., 'character' vectors) and was not able to be used by highlight. Spotted by Ken McGarry (see #104 for details).

• sentiment would not work if the polarity table contained no spaced words. Spotted by GitHub user mrwunderbar666 (see #117 for details).

• emotion would not give the correct response when the text.var contained no negated words. Spotted by git-igor (see #108 for details).

MINOR FEATURES

• sentiment and emotion (sentiment_by, emotion_by & their extract_ methods inherit this as well) pick up a retention_regex argument. This regex was previously hard-coded in the function and didn't give users access to change this. The previous version "\\d:\\d|\\d\\s|[^a-z',;: ]" was switched to "\\d:\\d|\\d\\s|[^[:alpha:]',;: ]" as the later swaps a-z for [:alpha:] meaning more alphabetic characters are retained. While sentimentr has not been tested on other languages, this opens up the possibility for use with other (especially Germanic) languages. Thank you to johanneswaage and Matthias2018 for raising awareness of this issue and Dominique EMMANUEL for suggesting a potetial way forward. This suggestion led to the reworking and current approach (see issues #74, #79 & #118 for more).

IMPROVEMENTS

• Added description of what the numeric value of sentiment() means (see Results in ?sentiment) and examples of how to bin the score to a 3 category c('Negative', 'Neutral', 'Positive') factor output. These improvements in documentation came from an issue raised by Sadettin Demirel (see #128).

sentimentr 2.7.0 - 2.7.1

BUG FIXES

• The plot method for sentiment and profanity failed for n < 100 observations. Interpolation via stats::approx provides a means to fill in the gaps in cases of n < 100.

• The crowdflower_self_driving_cars dataset contained text that read as "Error in gsub(replaces[i], c("'", "'", "\\"", "\\"")[i], x, fixed = TRUE): input string 12 is invalid UTF-8". Spotted thanks to Shantanu Kumar.

• Sequential bigram polarized word chunks resulted in a concatenation that rendered the trigram chunk as non-polar. For example, "he gave time honored then" contains both the bigram chunk "gave time" and "time honored" this results in word chunking that created the tokens {'he', 'gave time honored', 'then'}. The token 'gave time honored' was not matched by either "gave time" or "time honored" resulting in a zero polarity score. Spotted thanks to GitHub user @swlazlowski (see #102).

• highlight() used mean() as the averaging function regardless of the averaging.function argument supplied to sentiment_by(). This behavior has been corrected. Spotted thanks to Kelvin Lam (see #103).

NEW FEATURES

• emotion added as a means to assess the use of emotion in text.

• extract_emotion_terms added to extract emotion terms from text.

IMPROVEMENTS

• The default profanity list in profanity & extract_profanity_terms was not lower cased or unique which resulted in a warning every time it was run. This list is now passed as unique(tolower(lexicon::profanity_alvarez)) to avoid the warnings.

sentimentr 2.5.0 - 2.6.1

BUG FIXES

• plot returned an error for sentiment objects created by sentiment.get_sentences.data.frame due to the class assignments of the output ('sentiment' was not assigned as a class) and thus plot.sentiment was not called.

• combine_data contained a bug in which data sets with extra columns were not combined and resulted in an error (see #94).

• If a dataset was passed to get_sentences() that had a column named sentiment and was then passed to sentiment_by(), the sentiment from the original data set was returned as ave_sentiment not the sentimentr computed value.

NEW FEATURES

• profanity added as a means to assess the use of profanity in text.

• extract_profanity_terms added to extract profanity terms from text.

• The remaining four Hu & Liu data sets (see http://www.cs.uic.edu/~liub/FBS/CustomerReviewData.zip) have been added in addition to the Cannon reviews data set. The family of sentiment tagged data from Hu & Liu now includes: "hu_liu_apex_reviews", "hu_liu_cannon_reviews", "hu_liu_jukebox_reviews", "hu_liu_nikon_reviews", & "hu_liu_nokia_reviews".

CHANGES

• The cannon_reviews data set has been renamed to hu_liu_cannon_reviews to be consistent with the other hu_liu_ data sets that have been added. This data set is also now cleaner, excludes Hu & Liu's original categories that were some times still visible. Cleaning includes better capitalization and removal of spaces before punctuation to look less normalized. Additionally, the number column is now called reviewer_id to convey what the data actually is.

sentimentr 2.4.0 - 2.4.2

BUG FIXES

• In sentiment when there was a larger de-amplifier, negator, & polarized word all in the same chunk the sentiment would equal 0. This occurred because the de-amplifier weights below -1 are capped at -1 lower bound. To compute the weight for de-amplifiers this was added with 1 and then multiplied by the polity score. Adding 1 and -1 resulted in 0 * polarity = 0. This was spotted thanks to Ashley Wysocki (see #80). In the case Ashley's example was with an adversative conjunction which is treated as an extreme amplifier, which when combined with a negator, is treated as a de-amplifier. This resulted in a -1 De-amplifier score. De-amplifiers are now capped at -.999 rather than -1 to avoid this.

• Chunks containing adversative conjunctions were supposed to act in the following way: "An adversative conjunction before the polarized word...up-weights the cluster...An adversative conjunction after the polarized word down-weights the cluster...". A bug was introduced in which up-weighting happened to the first clause as well. This bug has been reversed. See #85.

• The README contained a reference to the magritrr rather than the magrittr package.

CHANGES

• highlight now writes the .html file to the temp directory rather than the working directory by default.

sentimentr 2.3.0 - 2.3.2

BUG FIXES

• The README and highlight function documentation both contained code that produced an error. This is because all the data sets within sentimentr have been normalized to include the same columns, including cannon_reviews. The code that caused the error referred to a column number which no longer existed in the data set. This column now exists in cannon_reviews again. Spotted thanks to Tim Fisher.

CHANGES

Maintenance release to bring package up to date with the lexicon package API changes.

sentimentr 2.1.0 - 2.2.3

BUG FIXES

• sentiment contained a bug that caused sentences with multiple polarized words and comma/semicolon/colon breaks to inappropriate replicate rows too many times (a recycling error). This in turn caused the same polarized word to be counted multiple times resulting in very extreme polarity values. This was spotted by Lilly Wang.

• validate_sentiment contained an error in the documentation; the predicted and actual data were put into the wrong arguments for the first example.

NEW FEATURES

• The default sentiment sentiment lookup table used within sentimentr is now lexicon::hash_sentiment_jockers_rinker, a combined and augmented version of lexicon::hash_sentiment_jockers (Jockers, 2017) & Rinker's augmented lexicon::hash_sentiment_huliu (Hu & Liu, 2004) sentiment lookup tables.

• Five new sentiment scored data sets added: kaggle_movie_reviews, nyt_articles hotel_reviews, crowdflower_self_driving_cars, crowdflower_products, crowdflower_deflategate, crowdflower_weather, & course_evaluations for testing nd exploration.

• replace_emoji and replace_emoji_identifier rexported from the textclean package for replacing emojis with word equivalents or an identifier token that can be detected by the lexicon::hash_sentiment_emoji polarity table within the sentiment family of functions.

MINOR FEATURES

• sentiment picks up the neutral.nonverb.like argument. This allows the user to treat specific non-verb uses of the word 'like' as neutral since 'like' as a verb is usually when the word is polarized.

• combine_data added to easily combine trusted sentimentr sentiment scored data sets.

CHANGES

• The sentiment data sets have been reformatted to conform to one another. This means columns have been renamed, ratings have been rescales to be zero as neutral, and columns other than sentiment score and text have been removed. This makes it easier to compare and combine data sets.

• update_key now allows a data.table object for x meaning lexicon hash_sentiment_xxx polarity tables can be combined. This is particularly useful for combining hash_sentiment_emojis with other polarity tables.

sentimentr 2.0.1

BUG FIXES

• get_sentences assigned the class to the data.frame when a data.frame was passed but not to the text column, meaning the individual column could not be passed to sentiment or sentiment_by without having sentence boundary detection re-done. This has been fixed. See #53.

sentimentr 1.0.1 - 2.0.0

BUG FIXES

• sentiment_attributes gave an incorrect count of words. This has been fixed and number of tokens is reported as well now. Thanks to Siva Kottapalli for catching this (see #42).

• extract_sentiment_terms did not return positive, negative, and/or neutral columns if these terms didn't exist in the data passed to text.var making it difficult to use for programming. Thanks to Siva Kottapalli for catching this (see #41).

• rescale_general would allow keep.zero when lower >= 0 meaning the original mid values were rescaled lower than the lowest values.

MINOR FEATURES

• validate_sentiment picks up Mean Directional Accuracy (MDA) and Mean Absolute Rescaled Error (MARE) measures accuracy. These values are printed for the validate_sentiment object and can be accessed via attributes.

CHANGES

• Many sentimentr functions performed sentence splitting (sentence boundary disambiguation) internally. This made it (1) difficult to maintain the code, (2) slowed the functions down and potentially increased overhead memory, and (3) required a repeated cost of splitting the text every time one of these functions was called. Sentence splitting is now handled vie the textshape package as the backend for get_sentences. It is recommended that the user spits their data into sentences prior to using the sentiment functions. Using a raw character vector still works but results in a warning. While this won't break any code it may cause errors and is a fundamental shift in workflow, thus the major bump to 2.0.0

sentimentr 0.5.0 - 1.0.0

BUG FIXES

• Previously update_polarity_table and update_valence_shifter_table were accidentally not exported. This has been corrected.

NEW FEATURES

• downweighted_zero_average, average_weighted_mixed_sentiment, and average_mean added for use with sentiment_by to reweight zero and negative values in the group by averaging (depending upon the assumptions the analyst is making).

• general_rescale added as a means to rescale sentiment scores in a generalized way.

• validate_sentiment added as a means to assess sentiment model performance against known sentiment scores.

• sentiment_attributes added as a means to assess the rate that sentiment attributes (attributes about polarized words and valence shifters) occur and co-occur.

MINOR FEATURES

• sentiment_by becomes a method function that now accepts sentiment_by and sentiment objects for text.var argument in addition to default character.

IMPROVEMENTS

• sentiment_by picks up an averaging.function argument for performing the group by averaging. The default uses downweighted_zero_average, which downweights zero values in the averaging (making them have less impact). To get the old behavior back use average_mean as follows. There is also an average_weighted_mixed_sentiment available which upweights negative sentences when the analysts suspects the speaker is likely to surround negatives with positives (mixed) as a polite social convention but still the affective state is negative.

CHANGES

• The hash keys polarity_table, valence_shifters_table, and sentiword have been moved to the lexicon (https://github.com/trinker/lexicon) package in order to make them more modular and maintainable. They have been renamed to hash_sentiment_huliu, hash_valence_shifters, and hash_sentiment_sentiword.

• The replace_emoticon, replace_grade and replace_rating functions have been moved from sentimentr to the textclean package as these are cleaning functions. This makes the functions more modular and generalizable to all types of text cleaning. These functions are still imported and exported by sentimentr.

• but.weight argument in sentiment function renamed to adversative.weight to better describe the function with a linguistics term.

• sentimentr now uses the Jockers (2017) dictionary by default rather than the Hu & Liu (2004). This may result in breaks to backwards compatibility, hence the major version bump (1.0.0).

sentimentr 0.3.0 - 0.4.0

BUG FIXES

• Missing documentation for `but' conjunctions added to the documentation. Spotted by Richard Watson (see #23).

NEW FEATURES

• extract_sentiment_terms added to enable users to extract the sentiment terms from text as polarity would return in the qdap package.

MINOR FEATURES

• update_polarity_table and update_valence_shifter_table added to abstract away thinking about the comparison argument to update_key.

sentimentr 0.2.0 - 0.2.3

BUG FIXES

• Commas were not handled properly in some cases. This has been fixed (see #7).

• highlight parsed sentences differently than the main sentiment function resulting in an error when original.text was supplied that contained a colon or semi-colon. Spotted by Patrick Carlson (see #2).

MINOR FEATURES

• as_key and update_key now coerce the first column of the x argument data.frame to lower case and warn if capital letters are found.

IMPROVEMENTS

• A section on creating and updating dictionaries was added to the README: https://github.com/trinker/sentimentr#making-and-updating-dictionaries

• plot.sentiment_by no longer color codes by grouping variables. This was distracting and removed. A jitter + red average sentiment + boxplot visual representation is used.

CHANGES

• Default sentiment and valence shifters get the following additions:
• polarity_table: "excessively", 'overly', 'unduly', 'too much', 'too many', 'too often', 'i wish', 'too good', 'too high', 'too tough'
• valence_shifter_table: "especially"

sentimentr 0.1.0 - 0.1.3

BUG FIXES

• get_sentences converted to lower case too early in the regex parsing, resulting in missed sentence boundary detection. This has been corrected.

• highlight failed for some occasions when using original.text because the splitting algorithm for sentiment was different. sentiment's split algorithm now matches and is more accurate but at the cost of speed.

NEW FEATURES

• emoticons dictionary added. This is a simple dataset containing common emoticons (adapted from Popular Emoticon List)

• replace_emoticon function added to replace emoticons with word equivalents.

• get_sentences2 added to allow for users that may want to get sentences from text and retain case and non-sentence boundary periods. This should be preferable in such instances where these features are deemed important to the analysis at hand.

• highlight added to allow positive/negative text highlighting.

• cannon_reviews data set added containing Amazon product reviews for the Cannon G3 Camera compiled by Hu and Liu (2004).

• replace_ratings function + ratings data set added to replace ratings.

• polarity_table gets an upgrade with new positive and negative words to improve accuracy.

• valence_shifters_table picks up a few non-traditional negators. Full list includes: "could have", "would have", "should have", "would be", "would suggest", "strongly suggest".

• is_key and update_key added to test and easily update keys.

• grades dictionary added. This is a simple dataset containing common grades and word equivalents.

• replace_grade function added to replace grades with word equivalents.

IMPROVEMENTS

• plot.sentiment now uses ... to pass parameters to syuzhet's get_transformed_values.

• as_key, is_key, & update_key all pick up a logical sentiment argument that allows keys that have character y columns (2nd column).

sentimentr 0.0.1

This package is designed to quickly calculate text polarity sentiment at the sentence level and optionally aggregate by rows or grouping variable(s).

trinker/sentimentr documentation built on Oct. 18, 2021, 12:20 a.m.