Document-level sentiment inference with social, faction, and discourse context

Abstract

We present a new approach for documentlevel sentiment inference, where the goal is to predict directed opinions (who feels positively or negatively towards whom) for all entities mentioned in a text. To encourage more complete and consistent predictions, we introduce an ILP that jointly models (1) sentence- and discourse-level sentiment cues, (2) factual evidence about entity factions, and (3) global constraints based on social science theories such as homophily, social balance, and reciprocity. Together, these cues allow for rich inference across groups of entities, including for example that CEOs and the companies they lead are likely to have similar sentiment towards others. We evaluate performance on new, densely labeled data that provides supervision for all pairs, complementing previous work that only labeled pairs mentioned in the same sentence. Experiments demonstrate that the global model outperforms sentence-level baselines, by providing more coherent predictions across sets of related entities.