ABSTRACT People tend to have various opinions about topics. In discussions, they can either agree or disagree with another person. The recognition of agreement and disagreement is a useful prerequisite for many applications. It could be used by political scientists to measure how controversial political issues are, or help a company to analyze how well people like their new products. In this work, we develop an approach for recognizing agreement and disagreement. However, this is a challenging task. While keyword-based approaches are only able to cover a limited set of phrases, machine learning approaches require a large amount of training data. We therefore combine advantages of both methods by using a bootstrapping approach. With our completely unsupervised technique, we achieve an accuracy of 72.85%. Besides, we investigate the limitations of a keyword based approach and a machine learning approach in addition to comparing various sets of features
