Ad hoc retrieval of documents with topical opinion

Abstract

With a growing amount of subjective content distributed across the Web, there is a need for a domain-independent information retrieval system that would support ad hoc retrieval of documents expressing opinions on a specific topic of the user's query. In this paper we present a lightweight method for ad hoc retrieval of documents which contain subjective content on the topic of the query. Documents are ranked by the likelihood each document expresses an opinion on a query term, approximated as the likelihood any occurrence of the query term is modified by a subjective adjective. Domain-independent user-based evaluation of the proposed method was conducted, and shows statistically significant gains over the baseline system. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.