Between bags and trees - Constructional patterns in text used for attitude identification

Abstract

This paper describes experiments to use non-terminological information to find attitudinal expressions in written English text. The experiments are based on an analysis of text with respect to not only the vocabulary of content terms present in it (which most other approaches use as a basis for analysis) but also with respect to presence of structural features of the text represented by constructional features (typically disregarded by most other analyses). In our analysis, following a construction grammar framework, structural features are treated as occurrences, similarly to the treatment of vocabulary features. The constructional features in play are chosen to potentially signify opinion but are not specific to negative or positive expressions. The framework is used to classify clauses, headlines, and sentences from three different shared collections of attitudinal data. We find that constructional features transfer well across different text collections and that the information couched in them integrates easily with a vocabulary based approach, yielding improvements in classification without complicating the application end of the processing framework. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.