Abstract
Conference (or journal) review forms represent a particular kind of sentiment-bearing documents, which has been to date left largely unexplored. We set up a review corpus including a subset or a whole of anonymized conference reviews from four conferences. Furthermore, by a thorough manual analysis of the review forms and guidelines of eleven conferences we identified a set of generic review criteria, which we used as aspects in aspect-based sentiment analysis (SA) of the review form texts. A sentiment lexicon was created specifically for the domain of conference paper reviews. The first step of the lexicon construction method was the manual definition of a two-level taxonomy. In the second phase, noun phrases and adjectives frequently appearing in the given portions of the review were automatically collected. The results of the lexicon-based SA method were compared with the numerical scores from the reviews. The precision of criterion identification was evaluated at 57.38% and the recall at 53.44%; the sentiment polarity was correct in over 75% of cases. This is an improvement on the result of a similar sentiment analysis carried out in a comparable study. © 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors