Weakly-supervised appraisal analysis

This article is concerned with the computational treatment of Appraisal, a Systemic Functional Linguistic theory of the types of language employed to communicate opinion in English. The theory considers aspects such as Attitude (how writers communicate their point of view), Engagement (how writers align themselves with respect to the opinions of others) and Graduation (how writers amplify or diminish their attitudes and engagements). To analyse text according to the theory we employ a weakly-supervised approach to text classification, which involves comparing the similarity of words with prototypical examples of classes. We evaluate the method's performance using a collection of book reviews annotated according to the Appraisal theory

Components of Ethical Leadership and Their Importance in Sustaining Organizations Over the Long Term

This article identifies components of ethical leadership and then aligns them with the style of leadership that includes them. The importance of such an article comes at a time when ethical practices or lack thereof seems to be increasingly prevalent in many organizations’ execution of their business practices. These organizations quite often have an ethics statement outlining required behavior of employees and tout their commitment to employees, society, and the customer, yet we continue to see major infractions of these codes of ethics. All this comes at a high financial cost to organizations. In order to avoid such fines, and damage to brand equity we propose ethical components which must permeate the organization to ensure appropriate behavior which neither breaks legal requirements, disengages the employee, or alienates the customer

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

Sentiment Analysis Based on Appraisal Theory for Assessing Incumbent Electability

Sentiment analysis is a useful study for determining opinions by classifying text. The document used in the research comes from Twitter about public opinion about community satisfaction related to performance of incumbent. The method used is Appraisal Theory. The data used are 1587 for Jokowi related data, 1774 for Ministry related data, and 1337 government related data. The result of data analysis from this research is that people have positive sentiments for incumbent. Innovation is a term that has the highest positive sentiment, whereas imaging is the term that has the lowest negative sentiment

What is wrong with Reid\u27s criticism of Hume on moral approbation?

In his "Essays on the Active Powers", Thomas Rreid criticises Hume’s theory of moral judgment and argues that it is untenable. The aim of this paper is to show that shares more with his target than is ordinarily acknowledged. The author suggests that the opposition between “cognitivism” and “non-cognitivism” concerning the role of feelings in moral judgment tends to obscure (disputable) assumptions held in common by both philosophers about the nature of feelings

Using the appraisal theory to analyze online restaurant reviews in the Lisbon region

Mestrado em Ciências EmpresariaisUser-generated content on Web 2.0 touristic websites can be important both for clients and companies of the sector. In the present work it were analyzed 503 online reviews, divided into 2769 sentence segments, from 22 restaurants in the Lisbon region, during the summer period 2012, on Tripadvisor.com. Resorting to an exploratory approach, the objective of this work is to identify the presence of attitude (affect, appreciation and judgement), in accordance with the Appraisal Theory. As well as verify the most mentioned attributes and polarity in each segment. Inter-rater agreement between two other evaluators was also checked, for attitude. The results obtained indicate that the dominant attitude is appreciation with positive polarity. Judgement is usually present when the service and Staff are mentioned, while affect is not often cited in this sample. This indicates that users tend to be more objective and less emotional on their restaurants evaluation. The most mentioned attributes were Quality of Food, Staff and Communication and Price, the majority of these had also positive polarity, which indicates that even in times of economic contention, Quality of Food should be the main focus. The inter-rater agreement was satisfactory. It is also concluded that user-generated content can be useful for managers to better understand the motivations, necessities and expectations of their clients and, in that way, focus their communication campaigns, products and services in order to answer these issues.A informação gerada pelos utilizadores em sítios turísticos Web 2.0 pode ser potencialmente importante tanto para clientes como para as empresas do sector. Neste trabalho foram analisados 503 comentários online, posteriormente divididos em 2769 segmentos de frase, provenientes do site Tripadisor.com referentes a 22 restaurantes da região de Lisboa, durante o período Verão de 2012. O objetivo do trabalho passou por, recorrendo a uma abordagem exploratória, identificar os tipos de atitude presente (afeto, apreciação e julgamento), de acordo com a Teoria da Avaliação. Assim como, verificar os tipos de atributos mais mencionados e a polaridade em cada segmento. Aferiu-se ainda a concordância da avaliação de atitude, recorrendo a dois avaliadores externos. Os resultados obtidos indicam que a atitude dominante é a apreciação com polaridade positiva. Julgamento é mencionado geralmente quando se aborda o serviço e o Staff, enquanto afeto foi pouco citado nesta amostra. Isto indica que os utilizadores tendem a ser mais objetivos e menos emocionais nas suas avaliações a restaurantes. Os atributos mais mencionados são Qualidade da Comida, Staff e Comunicação e Preço, todos com maioritariamente avaliação positiva, o que demonstra que mesmo em tempos de contenção a Qualidade da Comida deve continuar a ser a principal aposta. A concordância obtida foi satisfatória. Conclui-se ainda que a análise detalhada de comentários pode ser útil para que os gestores compreendam melhor as motivações, necessidades e expectativas dos seus clientes e dessa forma orientem as suas campanhas de comunicação e os seus produtos e serviços de forma a dar-lhes resposta

The Semantics of Evaluational Adjectives: Perspectives from Natural Semantic Metalanguage and Appraisal

We apply the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach (Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014) to the lexical-semantic analysis of English evaluational adjectives and compare the results with the picture developed in the Appraisal Framework (Martin & White 2005). The analysis is corpus-assisted, with examples mainly drawn from film and book reviews, and supported by collocational and statistical information from WordBanks Online. We propose NSM explications for 15 evaluational adjectives, arguing that they fall into five groups, each of which corresponds to a distinct semantic template. The groups can be sketched as follows: “First-person thought-plus-affect”, e.g. wonderful; “Experiential”, e.g. entertaining; “Experiential with bodily reaction”, e.g. gripping; “Lasting impact”, e.g. memorable; “Cognitive evaluation”, e.g. complex, excellent. These groupings and semantic templates are compared with the classifications in the Appraisal Framework’s system of Appreciation. In addition, we are particularly interested in sentiment analysis, the automatic identification of evaluation and subjectivity in text. We discuss the relevance of the two frameworks for sentiment analysis and other language technology applications

Language Evaluation of Covid-19 Vaccination News: Corpus of Indonesian Newspaper and Appraisal Insights

The current study is intended to explore the language evaluation of vaccination of covid-19 news of post-pandemic era in the corpus of the Jakarta post as Indonesian newspapers through the study of Systemic Functional Linguistics, hereafter SFL, by considering interpersonal meaning. To view and evaluate a comprehensive purpose, the corpus and appraisal analysis are deployed. The study revealed that the journalist, as media representation, tended to reflect a positive value corroborating with desirable attitude and preferred to show a good judgment through the news to society but the functional meaning should be depended with the whole context. The result also emphasized that media which realized by journalist engaged the society in persuading vaccination of Covid-19 to normalize all of human’s life aspect either healthy, economic, or other factor after the disruption era although as functionally it convey with a negative attitude. The study has implication for journalist that attitude rules are required to reach an effective interpersonal discourse of target community perspective in reporting and persuading a vaccination of covid-19 for the new normal era