Validating a sentiment dictionary for German political language—a workbench note

Christian Rauh

EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, 2018, vol. 15, issue 4, 319-343

Abstract: Automated sentiment scoring offers relevant empirical information for many political science applications. However, apart from English language resources, validated dictionaries are rare. This note introduces a German sentiment dictionary and assesses its performance against human intuition in parliamentary speeches, party manifestos, and media coverage. The tool published with this note is indeed able to discriminate positive and negative political language. But the validation exercises indicate that positive language is easier to detect than negative language, while the scores are numerically biased to zero. This warrants caution when interpreting sentiment scores as interval or even ratio scales in applied research.

Keywords: sentiment analysis; sentiment dictionary; text analysis; political language; German (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/180851/3/f ... uh-Validating-v3.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:espost:180851

DOI: 10.1080/19331681.2018.1485608

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().