Polarity Analysis of Texts using Discourse Structure

Heerschop, Bas and Goosen, Frank and Hogenboom , Alexander and Frasincar, Flavius and Kaymak, Uzay and Jong de, Franciska (2011) Polarity Analysis of Texts using Discourse Structure. In: 20th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2011, 24-28 October 2011, Glasgow, UK.

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Abstract:	Sentiment analysis has applications in many areas and the exploration of its potential has only just begun. We propose Pathos, a framework which performs document sentiment analysis (partly) based on a document’s discourse structure. We hypothesize that by splitting a text into important and less important text spans, and by subsequently making use of this information by weighting the sentiment conveyed by distinct text spans in accordance with their importance, we can improve the performance of a sentiment classifier. A document’s discourse structure is obtained by applying Rhetorical Structure Theory on sentence level. When controlling for each considered method’s structural bias towards positive classifications, weights optimized by a genetic algorithm yield an improvement in sentiment classification accuracy and macro-level F1 score on documents of 4.5% and 4.7%, respectively, in comparison to a baseline not taking into account discourse structure.
Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item
Copyright:	© 2011 ACM
Faculty:	Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS)
Research Group:	Human Media Interaction (HMI)
Link to this item:	http://purl.utwente.nl/publications/78531
Official URL:	http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2063576.2063730
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