Fine-grained Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis: Recognizing the intensity, polarity, and attitudes of private states

Private states (mental and emotional states) are part of the information that is conveyed in many forms of discourse. News articles often report emotional responses to news stories; editorials, reviews, and weblogs convey opinions and beliefs. This dissertation investigates the manual and automatic identification of linguistic expressions of private states in a corpus of news documents from the world press. A term for the linguistic expression of private states is subjectivity.The conceptual representation of private states used in this dissertation is that of Wiebe et al. (2005). As part of this research, annotators are trained to identify expressions of private states and their properties, such as the source and the intensity of the private state. This dissertation then extends the conceptual representation of private states to better model the attitudes and targets of private states. The inter-annotator agreement studies conducted for this dissertation show that the various concepts in the original and extended representation of private states can be reliably annotated.Exploring the automatic recognition of various types of private states is also a large part of this dissertation. Experiments are conducted that focus on three types of fine-grained subjectivity analysis: recognizing the intensity of clauses and sentences, recognizing the contextual polarity of words and phrases, and recognizing the attribution levels where sentiment and arguing attitudes are expressed. Various supervised machine learning algorithms are used to train automatic systems to perform each of these tasks. These experiments result in automatic systems for performing fine-grained subjectivity analysis that significantly outperform baseline systems

The Pittsburgh Courier: Advocate for Integration of the U.S. Armed Forces (1934-1940)

This study is a quantitative and qualitative content analysis designed to determine how the Pittsburgh Courier reported the issue of African-American military participation and integration of the U.S. Armed Forces prior to World War II and how that news coverage changed over time. The researcher analyzed 368 news items from 312 weekly editions of the Courier published between September 1, 1934, and September 21, 1940. The researcher compared news content across two periods within the time range specified for the study. The researcher found that the Courier consistently and extensively reported on the issue during the time period. The Courier portrayed the issue of racial discrimination in the military and the argument for integration differently at different periods. An analysis of the major themes showed that racial discrimination as an argument for integration was the dominant theme throughout both periods as compared to the argument of civil rights or African-American military capability, heroism, and patriotism. There was no significant difference between sources by race in articles that discussed the issue. Both African-American and Caucasian sources were attributed equally throughout both time periods. The major contribution of this study to the literature is that it provides a view of what was occurring regarding the political battle to end segregation in the U.S. Armed Forces prior to World War II

Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse

The goal of argumentation mining, an evolving research field in computational linguistics, is to design methods capable of analyzing people's argumentation. In this article, we go beyond the state of the art in several ways. (i) We deal with actual Web data and take up the challenges given by the variety of registers, multiple domains, and unrestricted noisy user-generated Web discourse. (ii) We bridge the gap between normative argumentation theories and argumentation phenomena encountered in actual data by adapting an argumentation model tested in an extensive annotation study. (iii) We create a new gold standard corpus (90k tokens in 340 documents) and experiment with several machine learning methods to identify argument components. We offer the data, source codes, and annotation guidelines to the community under free licenses. Our findings show that argumentation mining in user-generated Web discourse is a feasible but challenging task.Comment: Cite as: Habernal, I. & Gurevych, I. (2017). Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse. Computational Linguistics 43(1), pp. 125-17

Visualizing Evaluative Language in Relation to Constructing Identity in English Editorials and Op-Eds

This thesis is concerned with the problem of managing complexity in Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) analyses of language, particularly at the discourse semantics level. To deal with this complexity, the thesis develops AppAnn, a suite of linguistic visualization techniques that are specifically designed to provide both synoptic and dynamic views on discourse semantic patterns in text and corpus. Moreover, AppAnn visualizations are illustrated in a series of explorations of identity in a corpus of editorials and op-eds about the bin Laden killing. The findings suggest that the intriguing intricacies of discourse semantic meanings can be successfully discerned and more readily understood through linguistic visualization. The findings also provide insightful implications for discourse analysis by contributing to our understanding of a number of underdeveloped concepts of SFL, including coupling, commitment, instantiation, affiliation and individuation

Local 21\u27s Quest for a Moral Economy: Peabody, Massachusetts and its Leather Workers, 1933-1973

The industrial working class began the middle decades of the twentieth century with unlimited hope and possibility but ended them fraught with disillusionment and dismay. This marked a disjointed experience as optimism for the future gave way to disenchantment. With the ratification of the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933 and the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, hundreds of thousands of workers across the United States became union members. The euphoria that this initial burst of unionization created, however, could not be sustained throughout the post-World War II years. The Cold War, McCarthyism and later the onset of de-industrialization ushered in new phases in working class history marked by the gradual ineffectiveness of the working class to shape domestic policy. In order to provide better insight on the potential, achievements, and disappointments of the industrial working class in the twentieth century, this study examines a community-based leather worker\u27s union-Local21-in the small New England city of Peabody, Massachusetts, from 1933 to 1973. Eighteen miles northeast of Boston, Peabody was considered the leather capital of the world in 1919 when it employed 8,600 people in 106 tanneries and produced more leather in a year than anywhere else in the world. Because of their importance in the early and midtwentieth century, Peabody and its leather workers offer an insightful case study for understanding the working class during a transformative period. Growing out of community unrest during the New Deal era, Local 2 1 persevered through the darkest days of the national union movement after World War I1 and remained a communitybased union intent on creating a more democratic culture-a culture based on a moral economy stressing the needs of the working class individual over corporate profits. Even though the union\u27s gains did not totally alter the social and industrial landscape of Peabody, for a brief time Peabody leather workers gained a measure of power that allowed them to have a voice in reshaping their workplace and community

Imagining the Nigerian nation through the West African pilot 1960-1966.

The independence era in Nigeria, ushered in after 1960 and ending in 1966 with the fall of the civilian-elected government in a military coup, was a pivotal juncture in the construction and imagining of the nation and the citizen. Ideas of what a citizen should act like, dress like, and what mindsets were proper to hold were discussed frequently in the media. One critically important media outlet during the independence era was the West African Pilot. The Pilot is generally considered an influential nationalist publication during and prior to this era. This thesis explores how Nigeria was imagined through the Pilot. It focuses on the complexities of citizenship which were discussed through the paper’s articles, columns, and advertisements, with due attention to the products the advertisements attempted to sell. My argument contests the homogeneous notion claiming that the Pilot only contributed to the hardening of ethnic identities and allegiances leading into the civil war in 1967. Instead, the articles, columns, and advertisements in the Pilot suggest multiple vi Imaginings of citizenship not solely based on ethnicity, but also gender and consumerism