On Positivity Bias in Negative Reviews

TL;DR

This paper investigates the positivity bias in negative reviews, revealing that negative reviews often contain more positive words due to negation usage, which affects sentiment interpretation.

Contribution

It uncovers the prevalence of positive words in negative reviews and explains this phenomenon through the pragmatic role of negation in language.

Findings

Negative reviews contain more positive words than negative words.

Negations in negative reviews are often associated with positive words.

Sentences with positive words in negative reviews typically express negative opinions.

Abstract

Prior work has revealed that positive words occur more frequently than negative words in human expressions, which is typically attributed to positivity bias, a tendency for people to report positive views of reality. But what about the language used in negative reviews? Consistent with prior work, we show that English negative reviews tend to contain more positive words than negative words, using a variety of datasets. We reconcile this observation with prior findings on the pragmatics of negation, and show that negations are commonly associated with positive words in negative reviews. Furthermore, in negative reviews, the majority of sentences with positive words express negative opinions based on sentiment classifiers, indicating some form of negation.