Semantic orientation for polarity classification in Spanish reviews

•We present a lexicon of opinion words for sentiment analysis in Spanish.•We describe the process of the lexicon generation.•We assess the new resource following a lexicon based method for polarity classification in a corpus movie reviews in Spanish. Until now most of the published methods for polarity classification have been applied to English texts, but other languages are becoming increasingly important. This paper presents a new resource for the Spanish sentiment analysis research community. We have generated a new lexicon by translating into Spanish the Bin Liu English Lexicon. In order to assess the validity of the proposed lexicon a set of experiments on a Spanish review corpus are presented. In addition, the resource presented is compared with another existing Spanish lexicon. The results show that our resource outperforms the currently available Spanish lexicon for sentiment analysis.