Identifying Subjective and Figurative Language in Online Dialogue

More and more of the information on the web is dialogic, from Facebook newsfeeds, to forum conversations, to comment threads on news articles. In contrast to traditional, monologic resources such as news, highly social dialogue is very frequent in social media, as illustrated in the snippets in Fig. 1 from the publicly available Internet Argument Corpus (IAC) (Walker et al., 2012). Utterances are frequently sarcastic, e.g., Really? Well, when I have a kid, I’ll be sure to just leave it in the woods, since it can apparently care for itself (R2 in Fig. 1 as well as Q1 and R1), and are often nasty, (R2 in Fig. 1). Note also the frequent use of dialogue specific discourse cues, e.g. the use of No in R1, Really? Well in R2, and okay, well in Q3 in Fig. 1 (Fox Tree and Schrock, 1999; Bryant and Fox Tree, 2002; Fox Tree, 2010).