We describe an unsupervised approach to the problem of automatically detecting subgroups of people holding similar opinions in a discussion thread. An intuitive way of identifying this is to detect the attitudes of discussants towards each other or named entities or topics mentioned in the discussion. Sentiment tags play an important role in this detection, but we also note another dimension to...

Public preferences for environmental policies often vary among individual citizens according to their socio-economic characteristics and attitudes toward environmental programs. Most researchers account for socio-economic characteristics when conducting public preference surveys, but do not account for differences in preferences that transcend socio-economic categories. Identifying the public’s...

Attitudes towards active voluntary euthanasia (AVE) and physician-assisted suicide (PAS) among 1,238 doctors on the medical register of New South Wales varied significantly with self-identified religious affiliation. More doctors without formal religious affiliation ('non-theists') were sympathetic to AVE, and acknowledged that they had practised AVE, than were doctors who gave any religious af...

This study examined the relationships among eating attitudes, exercise identity, and body alienation in ultramarathoners. Eighty-seven competitive ultramarathoners (73 males, 14 females) completed the Eating Attitudes Test-26, Exercise Identity Scale, and Body Alienation Scale as part of their pre-race registration. Correlation coefficients revealed that eating attitudes were positively related...

INTRODUCTION There is little research identifying medical students' attitudes towards communication skills learning. This pilot study outlines the development of a new scale to measure attitudes towards communication skills learning. METHODS First- and second-year medical students (n = 490) completed the 26-item Communication Skills Attitude Scale (CSAS) and 39 students completed the CSAS on ...

This work investigated crosslinguistic perception of Mandarin utterances conveying six classes of attitudes, i.e., dominant/ submissive, friendly/hostile, polite/rude, serious/joking, praising/blaming, and sincere/insincere. Five groups of subjects were tested: native Mandarin speakers, Japanese L2 learners of Mandarin, French L2 learners of Mandarin, naïve Japanese without Mandarin ability, an...

Organic agriculture (OA) includes a comprehensive production management system that is considered as one of the strategies to reduce negative impacts of industrial agriculture in many countries. This research was identifying factors affecting the development of OA in Ardabil province. A descriptive– correlation survey approach was used in this study. Participants were agricultural specialists o...

AIMS Parental attitudes and behaviour with regard to young people and alcohol are associated with teenagers' drinking behaviour. This study examined the association between sociodemographic factors among parents and parental attitudes and behaviour with regard to alcohol and adolescents. METHODS Postal questionnaires were sent to parents of children aged 12-16 years in six Swedish municipalit...

The relation of minor psychiatric morbidity with labour turnover is examined, using data from a study of young, predominantly middle class, white collar men and women. The results suggest that the presence of psychiatric symptomatology is at least as important as occupational attitudes in identifying individuals who would subsequently leave the organisation.