Is Gender Reference Gender-specific? Studies in a Polar Domain

We investigate how gender authorship influences polar, i.e. positive and negative gender reference. Given German-language newspaper texts where the full names of the authors are known and their gender can be inferred from the first names. And given that nouns in the text have gender reference, i.e. are labeled by a gender classifier as female or male denoting nouns. If these nouns carry a polar load, they count towards the gender-specific statistics we are interested in. A polar load is given either via phrase-level sentiment composition, or by a verb-based analysis of the polar role a noun (phrase) plays: is it framed by the verb as a positive or negative actor, or as receiving a positive or negative effect? Also, reported gender-gender relations ({in favor, against}) might be gender-specific. Statistical hypothesis testing is carried out in order to find out whether significant gender-wise correlations exist. We found that, in fact, gender reference is gender-specific: each gender significantly more often focuses on their own gender than the other one and e.g. positive actorship supremacy is claimed (intra-) gender-wise

Enhancing Coreference Clustering

Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Anaphora Resolution (WAR II). Editor: Christer Johansson. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 2 (2008), 31-40. © 2008 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/7129

Semantic Role Labeling for Sentiment Inference: A Case Study

In this paper, we evaluate in a case study whether semantic role labelling (SRL) can be reliably used for verb-based sentiment inference (SI). SI strives to identify polar relations (against, in-favour-of) between discourse entities. We took 300 sentences with 10 different verbs that show verb alternations or are ambiguous in order to find out if current SRL systems actually can assign the correct semantic roles and find the correct underlying predicates. Since in SI each verb reading comes with a particular polar profile, SRL is useful only if its analyses are consistent and reliable. We found that this is not (yet) given for German

An Italian Verb Lexicon for Sentiment Inference

Verb-centered sentiment analysis provides a fine-grained perspective on the polar impact a situation has on its participants. It is good for a person to be honored for e.g. some achievement and we know in advance that such an achievement is expected to have positive polarity. Also, there is a positive relation between the honorer and the honoree. We introduce an Italian verb lexicon that specifies the polar relations a verb expresses and the effects and expectations that the roles of the verb bear