  Negators, modals, and degree adverbs can significantly affect the sentiment
of the words they modify. Often, their impact is modeled with simple
heuristics; although, recent work has shown that such heuristics do not capture
the true sentiment of multi-word phrases. We created a dataset of phrases that
include various negators, modals, and degree adverbs, as well as their
combinations. Both the phrases and their constituent content words were
annotated with real-valued scores of sentiment association. Using phrasal terms
in the created dataset, we analyze the impact of individual modifiers and the
average effect of the groups of modifiers on overall sentiment. We find that
the effect of modifiers varies substantially among the members of the same
group. Furthermore, each individual modifier can affect sentiment words in
different ways. Therefore, solutions based on statistical learning seem more
promising than fixed hand-crafted rules on the task of automatic sentiment
prediction.
