SICS at NTCIR-7 MOAT: Constructions Represented in Parallel with Lexical Items

This paper describes experiments to find attitudinal expressions in written English text. The experiments are based on an analysis of text with respect to not only the vocabulary of content terms present in it (which most other approaches use as a basis for analysis) but also on structural features of the text as represented by presence of function words (in other approaches often removed by stop lists) and by presence of constructional features (typically disregarded by most other analyses). In our analysis, following a constructional grammatical framework, structural features are treated similarly to vocabulary features. Our results give us reason to conclude – provisionally, until more empirical verification experiments can be performed – that: • Linguistic structural information does help in establishing whether a sentence is opinionated or not; whereas • Linguistic information of this specific type does not help in distinguishing sentences of differing polarity.