Use of Sound Symbolism in Sentiment Classification

Abstract

In linguistics, sound symbolism is an idea that the vocal sounds of certain words carry meaning in themselves. This paper focuses on the sound symbolism of onomatopoeic words and demonstrates the close relationship between sound symbolism and sentiment polarity. Because onomatopoeic words imitate the sounds they represent, they can help us better understand the sentiment of a sentence when utilizing sound symbolism. Therefore, we modeled sound symbolism with N-gram-based features and applied the model to a series of sentiment classification tasks. The experimental results show that this method with sound symbolism significantly outperformed the baseline method without sound symbolism, which effectively demonstrates that a close relationship exists between sound symbolism and sentiment polarity.