  The method of paired comparisons is an established method in psychology. In
this article, it is applied to obtain continuous sentiment scores for words
from comparisons made by test persons. We created an initial lexicon with
$n=199$ German words from a two-fold all-pair comparison experiment with ten
different test persons. From the probabilistic models taken into account, the
logistic model showed the best agreement with the results of the comparison
experiment. The initial lexicon can then be used in different ways. One is to
create special purpose sentiment lexica through the addition of arbitrary words
that are compared with some of the initial words by test persons. A
cross-validation experiment suggests that only about 18 two-fold comparisons
are necessary to estimate the score of a new, yet unknown word, provided these
words are selected by a modification of a method by Silverstein & Farrell.
Another application of the initial lexicon is the evaluation of automatically
created corpus-based lexica. By such an evaluation, we compared the
corpus-based lexica SentiWS, SenticNet, and SentiWordNet, of which SenticNet 4
performed best. This technical report is a corrected and extended version of a
presentation made at the ICDM Sentire workshop in 2016.
