Determining the polarity and source of opinions expressed in political debates

Abstract

In this paper we investigate different approaches we developed in order to classify opinion and discover opinion sources from text, using affect, opinion and attitude lexicon. We apply these approaches on the discussion topics contained in a corpus of American Congressional speech data. We propose three approaches to classifying opinion at the speech segment level, firstly using similarity measures to the affect, opinion and attitude lexicon, secondly dependency analysis and thirdly SVM machine learning. Further, we study the impact of taking into consideration the source of opinion and the consistency in the opinion expressed, and propose three methods to classify opinion at the speaker intervention level, showing improvements over the classification of individual text segments. Finally, we propose a method to identify the party the opinion belongs to, through the identification of specific affective and non-affective lexicon used in the argumentations. We present the results obtained when evaluating the different methods we developed, together with a discussion on the issues encountered and some possible solutions. We conclude that, even at a more general level, our approach performs better than trained classifiers on specific data. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.