New Approach Needed:

Contemporary dictionary-based sentiment analysis methods face validity issues when applied to specialized vocabularies, such as legal terminology. Human-coded dictionaries for these applications are often labor-intensive and inefficient.

Innovative Solution:

This study demonstrates the viability of "minimally-supervised" approaches—using a corpus drawn from specialized text—to create reliable sentiment dictionaries without exhaustive human coding.

Benchmarks Confirm Superiority:

Our method shows notable accuracy improvements on large-scale computational linguistics benchmark datasets compared to standard (non-specialized) dictionaries:

• Achieved higher precision across multiple metrics
• Reduced false positives and negatives by significant margins
• Outperformed existing resources in specialized contexts

Why It Matters for Political Science:

This approach offers substantial benefits for analyzing texts relevant to political researchers:

✅ Analyzing Legal Language: Effectively assesses sentiment in US federal appellate court decisions, which contain complex policy-related discourse.

✅ Efficient Research Tool: Provides a more economical method than traditional human coding while maintaining validity standards.