Hello! I am a beginner in Perl. I found this page (http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/research/projects/ita-misunderstandings/semantic/code/sentiment.pl) with many codes for natural language processing. The codes I am interested in are the ones dealing with SentiWordNet. I just don't understand the following part:

=head3 getWordOrientation

=head4 Description

Calculate the sentiment values for the given word using local copy of 
+Sentiwordnet. We search for sentiment values of most frequently used 
+adjective form of the given word and then the most frequently used ad
+verb form of the given word.

=head4 Inputs

=over 12

=item Word for which we need to find out the sentiment.

=item Reference to array of Lemmas from Sentiwordnet.

=item Hash of Positive values from Sentiwordnet.

=item Hash of Negative values from sentiwordnet.

=back

=head4 Outputs

=over 12

=item Positive score for the word.

=item Negative score for the word.

=item Neutral score for the word.

=item -1 -1 -1 if word is not found in Sentiwordnet.

=back

=cut
[download]

Is that part of a code? I don't understand really. What does this = sign mean? Thank you for your help!