Sentix v3.0

Sentix is an affective lexicon for the Italian language, created in 2013, and available via the sentixR R package on GitHub since 2019 (Basile, 2019-2024). Sentix 3.0 represents a major update, incorporating an expanded set of lemmas (63,660 entries), with associated polarity scores (ranging from -1 to +1) and categorical polarity classifications (Positive, Neutral, Negative).

Background

The original Sentix lexicon was created in 2013 (Basile & Nissim, 2013) by aligning several lexical resources: SentiWordNet (Baccianella et al., 2010), MultiWordNet (Pianta et al., 2002) and Wordnet (Fellbaum, 1998). Performance was evaluated against manually annotated data.

Sentix 2.0 aggregated polarity scores for lemma senses into a single score (-1 to 1) using a weighted average with sense frequencies from the SemCor corpus (Langone et al., 2004; Vassallo et al., 2020). Sentix 2.0 (41,800 lemmas) has been available via the sentixR R package on GitHub since 2019 (Basile, 2019-2024).

Two derived resources were also developed:

• MAL (Morphologically-inflected Affective Lexicon) (Vassallo et al., 2019): Expanded Sentix 2.0 with inflected forms from Morph-it! (Zanchetta & Baroni, 2005) to address lemmatization challenges in Italian sentiment analysis.

• WMAL (Weighted-MAL) (Vassallo et al., 2020): Recalculated MAL’s scores by weighting them with word frequencies from the TWITA corpus (Basile & Nissim, 2013) to reduce polarity imbalance. The weighting methodology and polarity calculation based on WMAL are key to Sentix 3.0’s polarity categorical classification.

Sentix v3.0: Update Process and Features

The update leading to Sentix 3.0 was the decision to harmonize all three resources (Sentix, MAL, WMAL) to ensure overall consistency.

This overall check involved: * Identifying entries in Sentix (i.e., entries that could be either base forms or inflected forms) that could generate unexpected duplicate entries when creating MAL. * Expanding Sentix by back-linking lemmas from Morph-it! traceable to pre-existing entries. * Adding neutral terms from SentiWordNet not already present in Sentix (22,117 entries).

The resources used for this update include SentiWordNet, MultiWordNet (via Open Multilingual Wordnet https://omwn.org/ (Bond et al., 2023; Bond & Paik, 2012), the TreeTagger library (Schmid et al., 2007), and Morph-it!.

Data Structure and Format

• File(s): sentix_v3.0.csv
• Encoding: UTF-8
• Separator: Comma (,)
• Columns:
  • lemma: (string) The lemma.
  • score: (float) The polarity score (-1, 1).
  • polarity: (string) The polarity classification ("Positive", "Negative", "Neutral").

License

This dataset is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY SA 4.0) License.

How to Cite Sentix v3.0

If you use Sentix v3.0 in your research, please cite it as follows:

Basile, V., Nissim, M., Bosco, C., Vassallo, M., & Gabrieli, G. (2025). Sentix (Versione 3.0.0) [Dataset]. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15609215

Authors

Creators: * Basile, Valerio (Università di Torino) * Nissim, Malvina (Università di Groningen) * Bosco, Cristina (Università di Torino) * Gabrieli, Giuliano (CREA-PB) * Vassallo, Marco (CREA-PB)

Contributors: * Vardanega, Agnese (Università di Teramo)

References

Baccianella, S., Esuli, A., & Sebastiani, F. (2010). Sentiwordnet 3.0: An enhanced lexical resource for sentiment analysis and opinion mining. Lrec, 10, 2200–2204.

Basile, V. (2019-2024). Valeriobasile/sentixR.

Basile, V., & Nissim, M. (2013). Sentiment analysis on Italian tweets. Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis, 100–107.

Bond, F., Goodman, M. W., Rudnicka, E., da Costa, L. M., Rademaker, A., & McCrae, J. P. (2023). Documenting the Open Multilingual Wordnet. In G. Rigau, F. Bond, & A. Rademaker (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th Global Wordnet Conference (pp. 150–157). Global Wordnet Association.

Bond, F., & Paik, K. (2012). A survey of wordnets and their licenses. Proceedings of the 6th Global WordNet Conference (GWC 2012), 64–71.

Fellbaum, C. (1998). WordNet: An electronic lexical database. MIT press.

Langone, H., Haskell, B. R., & Miller, G. A. (2004). Annotating WordNet. Proceedings of the Workshop Frontiers in Corpus Annotation at HLT-NAACL 2004, 63–69.

Pianta, E., Bentivogli, L., & Girardi, C. (2002). MultiWordNet: Developing an aligned multilingual database. First International Conference on Global WordNet, 293–302.

Schmid, H., Baroni, M., Zanchetta, E., & Stein, A. (2007). Il sistema “tree-tagger arricchito”–The enriched TreeTagger system. IA Contributi Scientifici, 4(2), 22–23.

Vassallo, M., Gabrieli, G., Basile, V., & Bosco, C. (2019). The tenuousness of lemmatization in lexicon-based sentiment analysis. Proceedings of the Sixth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics, 2481, 1–6.

Vassallo, M., Gabrieli, G., Basile, V., & Bosco, C. (2020). Polarity Imbalance in Lexicon-based Sentiment Analysis. In F. Dell’Orletta, J. Monti, & F. Tamburini (Eds.), Proceedings of the Seventh Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2020 : Bologna, Italy, March 1-3, 2021 (pp. 457–463). Accademia University Press.

Zanchetta, E., & Baroni, M. (2005). Morph-it! A free corpus-based morphological resource for the Italian language. Proceedings of Corpus Linguistics Conference Series 2005 (ISSN 1747-9398), 1, 1–12.