# TextBlob Sentiment: Calculating Polarity and Subjectivity

Sunday June 7, 2015

The TextBlob package for Python is a convenient way to do a lot of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. For example:

from textblob import TextBlob

TextBlob("not a very great calculation").sentiment
## Sentiment(polarity=-0.3076923076923077, subjectivity=0.5769230769230769)

This tells us that the English phrase “not a very great calculation” has a polarity of about -0.3, meaning it is slightly negative, and a subjectivity of about 0.6, meaning it is fairly subjective.

But where do these numbers come from?

Let's find out by going to the source. (This will refer to sloria/TextBlob on GitHub at commit eb08c12.)

After digging a bit, you can find that the main default sentiment calculation is defined in _text.py, which gives credit to the pattern library. (I'm not sure how much is original and how much is from pattern.)

# Each word in the lexicon has scores for:
# 1)     polarity: negative vs. positive    (-1.0 => +1.0)
# 2) subjectivity: objective vs. subjective (+0.0 => +1.0)
# 3)    intensity: modifies next word?      (x0.5 => x2.0)

The lexicon it refers to is in en-sentiment.xml, an XML document that includes the following four entries for the word “great”.

<word form="great" cornetto_synset_id="n_a-525317" wordnet_id="a-01123879" pos="JJ" sense="very good" polarity="1.0" subjectivity="1.0" intensity="1.0" confidence="0.9" />
<word form="great" wordnet_id="a-01278818" pos="JJ" sense="of major significance or importance" polarity="1.0" subjectivity="1.0" intensity="1.0" confidence="0.9" />
<word form="great" wordnet_id="a-01386883" pos="JJ" sense="relatively large in size or number or extent" polarity="0.4" subjectivity="0.2" intensity="1.0" confidence="0.9" />
<word form="great" wordnet_id="a-01677433" pos="JJ" sense="remarkable or out of the ordinary in degree or magnitude or effect" polarity="0.8" subjectivity="0.8" intensity="1.0" confidence="0.9" />

In addition to the polarity, subjectivity, and intensity mentioned in the comment above, there's also “confidence”, but I don't see this being used anywhere. In the case of “great” here it's all the same part of speech (JJ, adjective), and the senses are themselves natural language and not used. To simplify for readability:

word   polarity  subjectivity  intensity
great       1.0           1.0        1.0
great       1.0           1.0        1.0
great       0.4           0.2        1.0
great       0.8           0.8        1.0

When calculating sentiment for a single word, TextBlob uses a sophisticated technique known to mathematicians as “averaging”.

TextBlob("great").sentiment
## Sentiment(polarity=0.8, subjectivity=0.75)

At this point we might feel as if we're touring a sausage factory. That feeling isn't going to go away, but remember how delicious sausage is! Even if there isn't a lot of magic here, the results can be useful—and you certainly can't beat it for convenience.

TextBlob doesn't not handle negation, and that ain't nothing!

TextBlob("not great").sentiment
## Sentiment(polarity=-0.4, subjectivity=0.75)

Negation multiplies the polarity by -0.5, and doesn't affect subjectivity.

TextBlob also handles modifier words! Here's the summarized record for “very” from the lexicon:

word   polarity  subjectivity  intensity
very        0.2           0.3        1.3

Recognizing “very” as a modifier word, TextBlob will ignore polarity and subjectivity and just use intensity to modify the following word:

TextBlob("very great").sentiment
## Sentiment(polarity=1.0, subjectivity=0.9750000000000001)

The polarity gets maxed out at 1.0, but you can see that subjectivity is also modified by “very” to become $$0.75 \cdot 1.3 = 0.975$$.

Negation combines with modifiers in an interesting way: in addition to multiplying by -0.5 for the polarity, the inverse intensity of the modifier enters for both polarity and subjectivity.

TextBlob("not very great").sentiment
## Sentiment(polarity=-0.3076923076923077, subjectivity=0.5769230769230769)

How's that?

$\text{polarity} = -0.5 \cdot \frac{1}{1.3} \cdot 0.8 \approx -0.31$

$\text{subjectivity} = \frac{1}{1.3} \cdot 0.75 \approx 0.58$

TextBlob will ignore one-letter words in its sentiment phrases, which means things like this will work just the same way:

TextBlob("not a very great").sentiment
## Sentiment(polarity=-0.3076923076923077, subjectivity=0.5769230769230769)

And TextBlob will ignore words it doesn't know anything about:

TextBlob("not a very great calculation").sentiment
## Sentiment(polarity=-0.3076923076923077, subjectivity=0.5769230769230769)

TextBlob goes along finding words and phrases it can assign polarity and subjectivity to, and it averages them all together for longer text.

And while I'm being a little critical, and such a system of coded rules is in some ways the antithesis of machine learning, it is still a pretty neat system and I think I'd be hard-pressed to code up a better such solution.

Check out the source yourself to see all the details!