Extracting Opinion Propositions and Opinion Holders using
Syntactic and Lexical Cues
Computing Attitude and Affect in Text: Theory and
Applications, (2006)Abstract
A new task is identified in the ongoing analysis of
opinions: finding propositional opinions, sentential complement
clauses of verbs such as “believe” or “claim” that express
opinions, and the holders of these opinions. An extension of
semantic parsing techniques is proposed that, coupled with
additional lexical and syntactic features, can extract these
propositional opinions and their opinion holders. A small corpus
of 5,139 sentences is annotated with propositional opinion
information, and is used for training and evaluation. While our
results are still quite preliminary (precisions of 43–51\% and
recalls of 58–68\%), we feel that our focus on opinion
clauses, and in general the use of rich syntactic features, helps
point to an important new direction in opinion detection.
