> associated with bad things

Is that not what's meant by sentiment?

My intuition is that word-level sentiment is rather pointless. “The Disaster Artist was not bad” has a positive sentiment overall, but each of the individual words, except possibly ‘artist’, have are usually thought to be negative. Moreover, you can totally flip the overall sentiment by adding another neutralish word “The Disaster Artist was not even bad.”

Similarly, my guess is that alley is rarely found in a positive context, but the actual sentiment comes from elsewhere in the utterance.

Word-level sentiment is like spherical cows in a vacuum in physics. Everyone knows its an extremely flawed model, but it produces good results in a lot of scenarios, so it will inevitably be used because it also has the enormous benefit of simplicity.

This article is about a simple model. Within that model, it absolutely makes sense for “dark black alley” to get a negative score.

It certainly gets a sentiment score, but whether that score is in any way meaningful or corresponds to actual human sentiment is important. Otherwise, you’re just playing stupid games, and winning stupid prizes...though I suppose just stupid is a step up from stupid and racist.