Sentiment Analysis : Does Coreference Matter ?

We investigate the boost in sentiment performance by taking coreference information into account. We mine user generated content for market research. Frequent topic shifts in the data lead us to investigate sentiment algorithms which look at a window of text around topic key phrases. We describe and implement a lightweight sentiment analysis system and show how the system performance can be improved by about 10% when taking into account nominal and pronominal coreference elements.