def load_lexicon(filename):
    """
    Load a file from Bing Liu's sentiment lexicon
    (https://www.cs.uic.edu/~liub/FBS/sentiment-analysis.html), containing
    English words in Latin-1 encoding.
    
    One file contains a list of positive words, and the other contains
    a list of negative words. The files contain comment lines starting
    with ';' and blank lines, which should be skipped.
    """
    lexicon = []
    with open(filename, encoding='latin-1') as infile:
        for line in infile:
            line = line.rstrip()
            if line and not line.startswith(';'):
                lexicon.append(line)
    return lexicon