SentiWordNet is an important lexical resource supporting sentiment analysis in opinion mining applications. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to construct a Vietnamese SentiWordNet (VSWN). SentiWordNet is typically generated from WordNet in which each synset has numerical scores to indicate its opinion polarities. Many previous studies obtained these scores by applying a machine learning method to WordNet. However, Vietnamese WordNet is not available unfortunately by the time of this paper. Therefore, we propose a method to construct VSWN from a Vietnamese dictionary, not from WordNet. We show the effectiveness of the proposed method by generating a VSWN with 39,561 synsets automatically. The method is experimentally tested with 266 synsets with aspect of positivity and negativity. It attains a competitive result compared with English SentiWordNet that is 0.066 and 0.052 differences for positivity and negativity sets respectively.