US Patent 9201860 System and methods for determining sentiment based on context

System and methods are disclosed for determining the connotation or sentiment type of a text unit comprising multiple terms and with a grammatical structure, such as subject+verb, verb+object, adjective+noun, noun+noun, noun+preposition+noun. The connotation or sentiment type of the text unit is determined by applying context rules where the context of the grammatical structure may change the inherent or default connotations of individual terms in the text unit. The methods provide a solution to the challenge of correctly or accurately determining the sentiment type of various linguistic structures under different context, and to the simplistic approach of using the inherent connotation of individual terms for the linguistic structure containing such terms.