Against 'Sentiment'

The position of this paper is that sentiment analysis lacks construct validity: it systematically fails to measure emotions in text. This position is elaborated through theoretical examination of the existing approach, which is shown to allow only rough correlates of emotion confounded with other properties of texts. Crude correlates are regarded by this critique as unacceptable in the absence of a theory capable of guiding their improvement. An alternative statistical approach for analysis of sentiment in text is proposed, along with discussion of how it would need to be developed.