City University of Hong Kong Dep
Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics,
Research Seminar
Weakly-Supervised Machine-Learning Techniques for Appraisal Analysis
Presented by
Mr. Jonathon Read
D.Phil. Candidate, University of Sussex
Date: 19 November 2008, Wednesday
Time: 4:30pm - 6:00pm
Venue: B7603 (Lift 3, 7/F, Blue Zone),Academic Building,CityU
Abstract
The Appraisal framework is a theory of the language of evaluation, developed within the tradition of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The framework describes a taxonomy of the types of language used to convey evaluation and position oneself with respect to the evaluations of other people. Accurate automatic recognition of these types of language can inform an analysis of document sentiment. I will describe the preparation of a corpus of book reviews manually annotated with labels from the Appraisal framework. The difficulty of the task is assessed by way of an inter-annotator agreement study. This corpus forms test data for weakly-supervised algorithms employing measures of semantic similarity that automatically label words according to their Appraisal type. I will present an evaluation of these methods, discuss potential improvements and outline possible applications.
Speaker
Jonathon Read is currently concluding a doctoral programme of research at the University of Sussex under the supervision of Professor John Carroll. During this programme he has also taken a place on the student board of the European Association for Computational Linguistics, and carried out consultancy work in the areas of sentiment analysis, social network analysis and topic classification. For further details please see http://www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/users/jlr24/
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