The application of sentiment analysis to a psychotherapy session : an exploratory study using four general-purpose lexicons

Veiga, Gonçalo Marmelo da Silva

http://hdl.handle.net/10400.12/7372

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Authors

Veiga, Gonçalo Marmelo da Silva

Advisor(s)

Pires, António Augusto Pazo

Abstract(s)

In this study we explore the application of sentiment analysis to a complete and in-person psychotherapy session. Sentiment analysis is a text mining technique that allows for the analysis, interpretation, and visualization of textual data. We investigate how we can apply a lexicon-based approach to analyze clinical session data, using four general-purpose lexicons available within an open-source statistical programming language environment, R. We conducted our study by comparing the performance of four general-purpose lexicons to the performance of n = 52 human raters, using inter-rater reliability (IRR) and intraclass correlation (ICC) measurements. Our findings suggest there is low to moderate agreement between human ratings and lexicon generated ratings, depending on the lexicon used. There are some benefits in applying a lexicon-based sentiment analysis approach to psychotherapy session data, namely the way it efficiently processes and analyses data and allows for novel visualizations of psychotherapy data. We recommend further investigation into the application of sentiment analysis as a technique, focusing on the performance of specific-purpose lexicons. We also recommend further research into comparing the performance of lexicon-based approaches to text classification approaches to the analysis of psychotherapy data.