Development of a General Purpose Sentiment Lexicon for Igbo Language

There are publicly available general purpose sentiment lexicons in some high resource languages but very few exist in the low resource languages. This makes it difficult to directly perform sentiment analysis tasks in such languages. The objective of this work is to create a general purpose sentiment lexicon for the Igbo language that can determine the sentiment of documents written in the Igbo language without having to translate it to the English language. The material used was an automatically translated lexicon by Liu and the manual addition of Igbo native words. The result of this work is a general purpose lexicon called IgboSentilex. The performance was tested on the BBC Igbo news channel. It returned an average polarity agreement of 95.75 percent with other general purpose sentiment lexicons. Accepted and presented at the Widening Natural Language Processing (WiNLP) workshop, co-located with the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) conference 2019 in Florence, Italy. See winlp.org