A linguistic approach to opinion mining

Abstract

Reviews are used every day by common people or by companies who need to make decisions. Such amount of social data can be used to analyze the present and to predict the near future needs or the probable changes. Mining the opinions and the comments is a way to extract knowledge by previous experiences and by the feedback received. In this chapter we propose an automatic linguistic approach to Opinion Mining by means of a semantic analysis of textual resources and based on FreeWordNet, a new developed linguistic resource. FreeWordNet has been defined by the enrichment of the meanings expressed by adjectives and adverbs in WordNet with a set of properties and the polarity orientation. These properties are involved in the steps of distinction and identification of subjective, objective or factual sentences with polarity valence and contribute in a basic way to the task of features contextualization.