Introducing argumention in opinion analysis: Language and reasoning challenges

Citation: C Albert and L Amgoud and F D de Saint-Cyr and P Saint-Dizier and C Costedoat (2011) Introducing argumention in opinion analysis: Language and reasoning challenges. Sentiment Analysis where AI meets Psychology (SAAIP)(workshop at IJCNLP'11) (RSS)
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Download: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W11/W11-3705.pdf
Tagged: Computer Science (RSS) opinion mining (RSS), online argumentation (RSS), argumentation mining (RSS), argument extraction (RSS)

Summary

This paper discusses opinionated, evaluative statements from the perspective of arguments. The hotel domain is the key example.

"very friendly welcome" is interpreted as an argument such as: "The hotel is good because the staff is very friendly" "Welcome is good because it is very friendly"

This is then parsed into a conclusion ("the hotel is good", assuming the first interpretation) and a support ("because the staff is very friendly"). We can argue both for and against this conclusion, with other statements.

"The conclusion orientation w.r.t. its attacks and supports reveal the customer preferences and priorities"

Theoretical and Practical Relevance

The authors do not make much of the fact that the opinion needs interpretation to become an argument; this is a key problem in understanding the informal argumentation on the social web.