Sentiment analysis

[Richard]

Analysing whether certain language has positive or negative connotations is a fairly frequent concern in research (as with Sayamol's work). Supposedly the Sentiment Tutorial (http://sentiment.christopherpotts.net/lexicon/results/) can help with this, as it summarises sentiment data from several sources.

It seems problematic, however. Putting in 'abase' gives the following results:
Wordnet: positive
SentiWordNet: negative
Opinion Lexicon: neutral

If you play with the site, do you also find conflicting results?

On a broader issue, do you think that positive/negative connotations can be attached to words, or does it depend on the context in which the word is used? (In the terminology of the first lesson on Linguistics, are connotations immanent or emergent?)