Towards Building Annotated Resources for Analyzing Opinions and Argumentation in News Editorials

Abstract

This paper describes an annotation scheme for argumentation in opinionated texts such as newspaper editorials, developed from a corpus of approximately 500 English texts from Nepali and international newspaper sources. We present the results of analysis and evaluation of the corpus annotation ― currently, the inter-annotator agreement kappa value being 0.80 which indicates substantial agreement between the annotators. We also discuss some of linguistic resources (key factors for distinguishing facts from opinions, opinion lexicon, intensifier lexicon, pre-modifier lexicon, modal verb lexicon, reporting verb lexicon, general opinion patterns from the corpus etc.) developed as a result of our corpus analysis, which can be used to identify an opinion or a controversial issue, arguments supporting an opinion, orientation of the supporting arguments and their strength (intrinsic, relative and in terms of persuasion). These resources form the backbone of our work especially for performing the opinion analysis in the lower levels, i.e., in the lexical and sentence levels. Finally, we shed light on the perspectives of the given work clearly outlining the challenges.

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