This paper analyzes opinion categories like Sentiment and Arguing in meetings. We first annotate the categories manually. We then develop genre-specific lexicons using interesting function word combinations for detecting the opinions. We analyze relations between dialog structure information and opinion expression in context of multiparty discourse. Finally we show that classifiers using lexica...

Generally, people who have had the opportunity to observe nonhuman animals, especially vertebrates, for any length of time take for granted that these beings are conscious and capable of suffering. If we are pressed to give a rational defense of this belief, we can have no better start than the inductive argument from analogy to other minds from one's own case. Beings who are neurologically hig...

In this paper we investigate two distinct tasks. The first task involves detecting arguing subjectivity, a type of linguistic subjectivity on which relatively little work has yet to be done. The second task involves labeling instances of arguing subjectivity with argument tags reflecting the conceptual argument being made. We refer to these two tasks collectively as “recognizing arguments”. We ...

In the environmental health literature, errors in interpreting studies or data are not infrequent. Many are of the Type II variety. Common solecisms of this type are: treating the criterion of p < 0.05 as a sacrament; demanding complete confounder control; arguing for the existence of phantom confounders; arguing that the effect size is trivial; building nonveridical models; arguing for no effe...