Improving the Detection of Comparison Arguments in Product Reviews

A common way to express sentiment about some product in a review is by comparing it to a different product. In order to get meaningful information about the comparison, we need to identify the separate parts: the predicate that expresses the comparison, the two compared entities, and the aspect that they are compared in. In this work, we assume the sentence and the predicate to be given and work on argument identification and classification. We show that syntax is more helpful than context for the task. We also improve performance on argument identification by including information about the type of the comparison. We were not able to prove our hypothesis that including information on the sentiment of the predicate improves performance on argument classification.