Sentimentti

Sentimentti is a term used in Finnish linguistics, psychology, and data science to denote the emotional evaluation expressed in language or discourse. It encompasses the polarity and sometimes the intensity of an attitude toward a subject, object, or proposition, typically categorized as positive, negative, or neutral, with potential gradations of strength.

The word sentimentti is the Finnish form of the English loanword sentiment; in Finnish scholarly and media use it denotes the affective stance conveyed by text or speech. In everyday language, it may refer to the mood of a person or the emotional tone of a statement, rather than a precise measurement.

In computational contexts, sentimentti is used to describe the target variable in sentiment analysis. Methods include lexicon-based approaches that assign valence scores to words, machine learning classifiers trained on labeled data, and hybrid models that combine both. Outputs are often document- or sentence-level sentiment scores or polarity labels, and may also produce continuous scores reflecting intensity.

Applications include monitoring social media, analyzing customer reviews, gauging political opinion, and evaluating brand perception. Challenges include handling sarcasm, negation, domain-specific language, multilingual data, and cultural nuances. The concept emphasizes that sentiment is not only a binary truth but a spectrum dependent on context and audience.

See also sentiment analysis, affective computing, emotion recognition, polarity.