  In lexicon-based classification, documents are assigned labels by comparing
the number of words that appear from two opposed lexicons, such as positive and
negative sentiment. Creating such words lists is often easier than labeling
instances, and they can be debugged by non-experts if classification
performance is unsatisfactory. However, there is little analysis or
justification of this classification heuristic. This paper describes a set of
assumptions that can be used to derive a probabilistic justification for
lexicon-based classification, as well as an analysis of its expected accuracy.
One key assumption behind lexicon-based classification is that all words in
each lexicon are equally predictive. This is rarely true in practice, which is
why lexicon-based approaches are usually outperformed by supervised classifiers
that learn distinct weights on each word from labeled instances. This paper
shows that it is possible to learn such weights without labeled data, by
leveraging co-occurrence statistics across the lexicons. This offers the best
of both worlds: light supervision in the form of lexicons, and data-driven
classification with higher accuracy than traditional word-counting heuristics.
