Measuring the Effect of Discourse Structure on Sentiment Analysis

International audienceThe aim of this paper is twofold: measuring the effect of discourse structure when assessing the overall opinion of a document and analyzing to what extent these effects depend on the corpus genre. Using Segmented Discourse Representation Theory as our formal framework, we propose several strategies to compute the overall rating. Our results show that discourse-based strategies lead to better scores in terms of accuracy and Pearson’s correlation than state-of-the-art approaches

A machine-learning approach to negation and speculation detection for sentiment analysis

Recognizing negative and speculative information is highly relevant for sentiment analysis. This paper presents a machine-learning approach to automatically detect this kind of information in the review domain. The resulting system works in two steps: in the first pass, negation/speculation cues are identified, and in the second phase the full scope of these cues is determined. The system is trained and evaluated on the Simon Fraser University Review corpus, which is extensively used in opinion mining. The results show how the proposed method outstrips the baseline by as much as roughly 20% in the negation cue detection and around 13% in the scope recognition, both in terms of F1. In speculation, the performance obtained in the cue prediction phase is close to that obtained by a human rater carrying out the same task. In the scope detection, the results are also promising and represent a substantial improvement on the baseline (up by roughly 10%). A detailed error analysis is also provided. The extrinsic evaluation shows that the correct identification of cues and scopes is vital for the task of sentiment analysis.Maite Taboada from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Discovery Grant 261104- 2008). This work was partly funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (TIN2009-14057-C03-03 Project) and the Andalusian Ministry of Economy, Innovation and Science (TIC 07629 and TIC 07684 Projects)

Evaluation in Discourse: a Corpus-Based Study

This paper describes the CASOAR corpus, the first manually annotated corpus that explores the impact of discourse structure on sentiment analysis with a study of movie reviews in French and in English as well as letters to the editor in French. While annotating opinions at the expression, the sentence or the document level is a well-established task and relatively straightforward, discourse annotation remains difficult, especially for non-experts. Therefore, combining both annotations poses several methodological problems that we address here. We propose a multi-layered annotation scheme that includes: the complete discourse structure according to the Segmented Discourse Representation Theory, the opinion orientation of elementary discourse units and opinion expressions, and their associated features. We detail each layer, explore the interactions between them and discuss our results. In particular, we examine the correlation between discourse and semantic category of opinion expressions, the impact of discourse relations on both subjectivity and polarity analysis and the impact of discourse on the determination of the overall opinion of a document. Our results demonstrate that discourse is an important cue for sentiment analysis, at least for the corpus genres we have studied

Chaîne de traitement pour une approche discursive de l'analyse d'opinion

La structure discursive d'un texte est un élément essentiel à la compréhension du contenu véhiculé par ce texte. Elle affecte, par exemple, la structure temporelle du texte, ou encore l'interprétation des expressions anaphoriques. Dans cette thèse, nous aborderons les effets de la structure discursive sur l'analyse de sentiments. L'analyse des sentiments est un domaine de recherche extrêmement actif en traitement automatique des langues. Devant l'abondance de données subjectives disponibles, l'automatisation de la synthèse des multiples avis devient cruciale pour obtenir efficacement une vue d'ensemble des opinions sur un sujet donné. La plupart des travaux actuels proposent une analyse des opinions au niveau du document ou au niveau de la phrase en ignorant la structure discursive. Dans cette thèse, nous nous plaçons dans le contexte de la théorie de la SDRT (Segmented Discourse Representation Theory) et proposons de répondre aux questions suivantes : -Existe-t-il un lien entre la structure discursive d'un document et les opinions émises dans ce même document ? -Quel est le rôle des relations de discours dans la détermination du caractère objectif ou subjectif d'un segment textuel ? -Quel est le rôle des éléments linguistiques, comme la négation et la modalité, lors de la détermination de la polarité d'un segment textuel subjectif ? -Quel est l'impact de la structure discursive lors de la détermination de l'opinion globale véhiculée dans un document ? -Est-ce qu'une approche basée sur le discours apporte une réelle valeur ajoutée comparée à une approche classique basée sur la notion de 'sacs de mots'? -Cette valeur ajoutée est-elle dépendante du genre de corpus ?The discourse structure of a document is a key element to understand the content conveyed by a text. It affects, for instance, the temporal structure of a text, or the interpretation of anaphoric expressions. The discourse structure showed its usefulness in numerous NLP applications, such as automatic summary, or textual entailment. In this thesis, we will study the effects of the discourse structure on sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis is an extremely active research domain in natural language processing. The last years have seen the multiplication of the available textual data conveying opinion on the web, and the automation of the summary of opinion documents became crucial for who wants to keep an overview of the opinion on a given subject. A huge interest lies in these data, both for the companies who want to retrieve consumer opinion, and for the consumers willing to gather information. Most of the current research efforts describe an opinion extraction at the document level or at the sentence level, ignoring the discourse structure. In this thesis work, we address opinion extraction through the discourse framework of the SDRT (Segmented Discourse Representation Theory), and try to answer to the following questions: -Is there a link between the discourse structure of a document and the opinions contained in that document? -What is the role of discourse relations in the determination of whether a textual segment is objective or subjective? -What is the impact of the discourse structure in the determination of the overall opinion conveyed by a document? -Does a discourse based approach really bring additional value compared to a classical "bag of words" approach