sentiment of "help"

[manyu26]

Why would different forms of "help" yield different sentiment scores?

sentiment("help") element_id sentence_id word_count sentiment 1: 1 1 1 0 sentiment("helps") element_id sentence_id word_count sentiment 1: 1 1 1 0.8 sentiment("helping") element_id sentence_id word_count sentiment 1: 1 1 1 0.5 sentiment("helped") element_id sentence_id word_count sentiment 1: 1 1 1 0.8

[manyu26]

Similarly,

sentiment("friend") element_id sentence_id word_count sentiment 1: 1 1 1 0.8 sentiment("friends") element_id sentence_id word_count sentiment 1: 1 1 1 0

though I can understand how the lexicon may have an original form of the word (friend) but not other forms (friends). For the case of "help", the original form was not labeled as positive but the higher-level forms (helps, helped...) were all given a positive score.

[trinker]

This is the result of the default lexicon:

lexicon::hash_sentiment_jockers_rinker[c('help', 'helps', 'helping','helped')]
         x   y
1:    help  NA
2:   helps 0.8
3: helping 0.5
4:  helped 0.8

You can change/update the provided lexicons to match your expectations or devise your own custom dictionary; see ?sentimentr::update_key for examples of how to do this.