Unsupervised Learning of Semantic Orientation from a Hundred-Billion-Word Corpus

The evaluative character of a word is called its semantic orientation. A positive semantic orientation implies desirability (e.g., "honest", "intrepid") and a negative semantic orientation implies undesirability (e.g., "disturbing", "superfluous"). This paper introduces a simple algorithm for unsupervised learning of semantic orientation from extremely large corpora. The method involves issuing queries to a Web search engine and using pointwise mutual information to analyse the results. The algorithm is empirically evaluated using a training corpus of approximately one hundred billion words — the subset of the Web that is indexed by the chosen search engine. Tested with 3,596 words (1,614 positive and 1,982 negative), the algorithm attains an accuracy of 80%. The 3,596 test words include adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and verbs. The accuracy is comparable with the results achieved by Hatzivassiloglou and McKeown (1997), using a complex four-stage supervised learning algorithm that is restricted to determining the semantic orientation of adjectives

Reinforcement Learning: A Survey

This paper surveys the field of reinforcement learning from a computer-science perspective. It is written to be accessible to researchers familiar with machine learning. Both the historical basis of the field and a broad selection of current work are summarized. Reinforcement learning is the problem faced by an agent that learns behavior through trial-and-error interactions with a dynamic environment. The work described here has a resemblance to work in psychology, but differs considerably in the details and in the use of the word ``reinforcement.'' The paper discusses central issues of reinforcement learning, including trading off exploration and exploitation, establishing the foundations of the field via Markov decision theory, learning from delayed reinforcement, constructing empirical models to accelerate learning, making use of generalization and hierarchy, and coping with hidden state. It concludes with a survey of some implemented systems and an assessment of the practical utility of current methods for reinforcement learning.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file