Abstract
Alleviating pain is good and abandoning hope is bad.
We instinctively understand how words like alleviate and abandon affect the polarity of a phrase, inverting or weakening it.
When these words are content words, such as verbs, nouns and adjectives, we refer to them as polarity shifters.
Shifters are a frequent occurrence in human language and an important part of successfully modeling negation in sentiment analysis;
yet research on negation modeling has focussed almost exclusively on a small handful of closed class negation words, such as not, no and without.
A major reason for this is that shifters are far more lexically diverse than negation words, but no resources exist to help identify them.