Subjectivity recognition on word senses via semi-supervised mincuts

Abstract

We supplement WordNet entries with information on the subjectivity of its word senses. Supervised classifiers that operate on word sense definitions in the same way that text classifiers operate on web or newspaper texts need large amounts of training data. The resulting data sparseness problem is aggravated by the fact that dictionary definitions are very short. We propose a semi-supervised minimum cut framework that makes use of both WordNet definitions and its relation structure. The experimental results show that it outperforms supervised minimum cut as well as standard supervised, non-graph classification, reducing the error rate by 40%. In addition, the semi-supervised approach achieves the same results as the supervised framework with less than 20% of the training data. © 2009 Association for Computational Linguistics.