1. Coupling Niche Browsers and Affect Analysis for an Opinion Mining Application
Gregory Grefenstette, Yan Qu,
James G. Shanahan, David A. Evans
Clairvoyance Corporation
Pittsburgh, PA

2. News Opinion Mining News Spider Context Extractor Affect Rater Niche
Browser
News
News
Spider
Context
Extractor
Entity XYZ
Affect
Rater

3. Niche Browsers Browse Entire Web Classify Pages
In niche? Then index
Outside niche? Then throw away
Niche specific information
Citeseer: title, author, citations
GoogleNews: date, source, title
MySimon: product, price
FlipDog: job title, location, qualifications

4. Examples of News on WWW

5. Affect Recognition Standard Information Retrieval Nuanced Information
stopwords: the, a, an, of, in, was, do, …
content words: weapon, sales, election, …
Nuanced Information
stopwords
affect bearing: great, sinister, attractive, …
content words

6. Affect in a Reporting Point of View
“Microsoft Togetherness”
Economist, January 22–28th, 2000, Business
There is both more and less than meets the eye to the decision of Bill Gates to pass the chief executive’s mantle to his best friend, Steve Ballmer. It is still business as usual at the world’s biggest software company. … Nor does the move presage a change in strategy. A belligerent Mr Ballmer reaffirmed the company’s hardline approach to defending the continuing antitrust action, predictably describing the break-up of the company that the government is rumoured to favour as reckless and irresponsible. Although Mr Gates spoke excitedly about Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS), a new idea that he would be working on, it is, in effect, just an ugly umbrella name for the grand Internet strategy under development at Redmond for some time. …

7. Affect Lexicons Lasswell Value Dictionary (1969)
Eight dimensions:
WEALTH, POWER, RECTITUDE, RESPECT, ENLIGHTENMENT, SKILL, AFFECTION, AND WELLBEING
positive or negative orientation
e.g., admire: RESPECT (positive)
General Inquirer dictionary (Stone, et al. 1965)
1,915 positive and 2,291 negative words
also labels: Active, Passive, ... , Pleasure, Pain, …Human, Animate, …, Region, Route,…, Fetch, Stay, ..

8. Clairvoyance Affect Lexicon
<lexical entry> <POS> <class> <centrality> <intensity>
"arrogance" sn "superiority" ..
"gleeful" adj “happiness”
"gleeful" adj “excitement” …
84 pair affect classes (positive/negative)

9. Opinion Miner User specifies entity “Long form” sent to Niche Browser
Long form, used to find precise articles
e.g., “Qusay Hussein”
Short form, used to find text segments
e.g., “Qusay”
“Long form” sent to Niche Browser
e.g.,
with optional date interval
Articles concerning entity (within interval) are retrieved by Miner
Up to 1000 articles (limitation of browser)
URLs retrieved and fetched

10. Opinion Miner, continued
Extract KWIC around short form
… detaining scores of people. Saddam's feared sons Uday and Qusay were buried on Saturday on the outskirts of Tikrit ….
…details on the final countdown of the end of Uday's and Qusay's reign of terror…
Sort unique windows
Recognize affect words using lexicon
"feared" fear vb fear
"terror“ terror sn fear
Score
[(positive-words)/(negative-words) ] -1.0
>0 more positive
<0 more negative
score(“qusay”) = (1536/3736)-1 = -0.6

11. Evaluation
“George Bush” mentions on two sites, the official White House site, and a US anti-government site:
WhiteHouse.gov
Copvcia.com

12. SCORE “summarizes” details
White House neighborhood of “Bush”:
decoration, not_fear, help, capture, attack, right, laugh, guard, force, combat, improve, good, dog, disaster, disarm, destruction, aid, wise, struggle, service, proud, prosperous, order, love, increased, important, hope, honored, grave, friend, foreign, fighting, expect, ensure, effective, dent, damage, challenge, assistance, appeal, agree, successes, success, strong, spirit, secure, safe, responsive, responsible, real, prosecute, prevent, prevail, plain, peace, not_terror, not_responsible, not_just, intelligence, integration, infected, hostages, honored, heart, health, great, grave, genocide, game, funerals, frustrated, frank, fire, enhance, educational, disasters, depart, demonstration, deliver, defend, creation, created, continue, confront, compassion, brave, assist,…
Anti-government site copvscia.com,
secret, force, intelligence, attack, order, trust, invasion, power, impeachment, foreign, court, clear, union, resolution, fall, criminal, blood, reason, high, concerned, supreme, real, failed, death, allies, ordered, hard, coup, concern, appeal, advised, warning, trial, powerful, important, illegal, dangerous, want, not_doubt, justice, flight, fight, favored, experience, elites, doomed, dead, critical, crimes, crashed, crash, convicted, climax, benefit, assault, warned, reason, production, hit, health, great, sins, sense, scandal, promised, pressure, oversight, open, not_surprise, not_attack, lust, laugh,…

13. Evaluation, continued
Scores in conservative, liberal newspapers in Dec’03
scores
Washington
Post
Times
Howard Dean
0.40
0.12
George Bush
0.15

14. Varying KWIC window sizes:
150 chars
100 chars
50 chars
Howard Dean Wash Post
0.12
0.16
0.19
George Bush Wash Post
-0.07
0.13
0.17
Howard Dean Wash Times
0.09
0.15
George Bush Wash Times
0.45
0.72
1.50

15. Press Opinion over Time
Pre-Election (August, 2003)
Arnold Schwarzenegger [Claritscore]
Gray Davis [Claritscore]
Post Election (Dec 2003)
Arnold Schwarzenegger [Claritscore]
winner

16. Related Work Scoring Reviews Affect/Opinion Detection Niche Browsers
“Cold Start Recommendations” (Schein et al., 2002)
“Mining Peanut Gallery” (Kushal et al., 2003)
“Measuring Praise/Criticism” (Turney & Littman, 2003)
Affect/Opinion Detection
AAAI Spring Symposium on Exploring Attitude and Affect in Text: Theories and Applications AAAI-EAAT, Stanford March 2004
Niche Browsers
Citeseer (Lawrence et al., 1999)
PROGENIE (Duboué et al., 2003)
HPSearch

17. Opinion Mining Niche Browsers Opinion Classifier Opinion Aggregator
Google
News
Niche
Browsers
E-opinion
Sites
Blog
Indexers
Opinion
Classifier
Very Positive
Opinion
Aggregator

18. Conclusions
Niche browsers extract certain type of WWW information
Affect analysis extracts emotive layer of text
Combination can provide simple opinion miner

19. The End