Opinionated Text Research Articles

The experiences of adults living with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator for cardiovascular disease: a systematic review of qualitative evidence protocol

The experiences of adults living with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator for cardiovascular disease: a systematic review of qualitative evidence protocol

Ideologies of Supreme Court Justices: Quantitative Thematic Analysis of Multiple Opinions of “Bush v. Gore 2000”

AbstractJudicial ideology is a latent trait that cannot be directly observed; its measurement must rely upon inferences drawn from observable traits or properties. In this paper, we assume that judicial ideologies of Supreme Court Justices may be inferred from the contents or themes of their authorial opinion texts, which embody their jurisprudential interpretation and reasoning on particular disputes of hard cases. The contents or themes of six opinion texts of “Bush v. Gore 2000” are analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively, with the latter as the focus. An indicator is borrowed from quantitative linguistics (QL) to quantify individual thematic words which contribute to the contents or themes of the text, that is, “thematic concentration” (TC). Our research yields the following results: First, both the highest and lowest TC value are found in the dissenting opinions, which may indicate the dynamism of thematic concentration of this type of opinion; Second, the common “thematic words” distilled from six opinions help to lexically profile the key “content domain” of this case; Third, the only thematic word “state” which appears in almost all opinion texts can be regarded as representing the most fundamental characteristic of the genre of appellate court opinions; Fourth, there exists a significant difference of TC in texts between the majority opinion and the dissenting opinion but not within the majority opinion, indicating that TC can reflect in a correct direction of the ideological stances of Supreme Court Justices; Fifth, TC in texts of three opinions get together, and qualitative analysis of these three opinions also shows that they concentrate on similar themes. The application of TC still have some challenges, but at least it offers an alternative path to measure ideologies of Supreme Court Justices, which contributes to the progress and development of forensic linguistics.

Propaganda and counter-propaganda in the official press during the Spanish Transition (1975-1978). Arriba vs. Odiel

This manuscript aims at unveiling whether the newspapers Arriba and Odiel went on being propaganda organs during the Spanish Transition, or if they assumed their role as political agents. To carry out this research, we have applied content analysis to opinion texts published in them since Franco’s demise (November 1975) up to the referendum on the Constitution (December 1978). This study provides evidence of that Odiel, being one of the smallest dailies within the Movement Press’ chain, did not follow the dictations coming from the national reference newspaper, Arriba, and, accordingly, shows the lack of a homogeneous discourse

Creating a Fine-Grained Corpus for Chinese Sentiment Analysis

Writing comments on products or news has become a popular activity in social media. The amount of opinionated text available online has been growing rapidly, increasing the need for techniques that can analyze opinions expressed in such text so that reviews can be easily absorbed by users. To date, most techniques depend on annotated corpora. However, existing corpora are almost sentence-level works that ignore important global sentiment information in other sentences. Given the rise of advanced applications, more fine-grained corpora are needed, even at the sentence level. The authors aim to create a fine-grained corpus for Chinese sentiment analysis, and more importantly, explore new sentiment analysis tasks by analyzing the annotated corpus. The proposed fine-grained annotation scheme not only introduces cross-sentence and global sentiment information (such as "target entity"') but also includes new sentence-level elements (such as "implicit aspect"). Based on this scheme, this corpus can provide a more fine-grained platform for researchers to study algorithms for advanced applications. In addition, an in-depth analysis on the annotated corpus is made and several important but ignored tasks, such as the target-aspect pair extraction task, are explored, which can give useful hints about future directions.

Improving opinion retrieval in social media by combining features-based coreferencing and memory-based learning

Social networks messaging typically contains a lot of implicit linguistic information partially due to restrictions on a message’s length (i.e., few named entities, short sentences, no discourse structure, etc.). This may significantly impact several applications including opinion mining, sentiment analysis, etc., as data collection tasks such as opinion retrieval tasks will fail to obtain all the relevant messages whenever the target topic, objects, or features are not explicit within the texts. In order to address these issues, in this paper a novel adaptive approach for opinion retrieval is proposed. It combines natural-language co-referencing techniques, features-based linguistic preprocessing and memory-based learning to resolving implicit co-referencing within informal opinion texts by using underlying hierarchies of thread messages. Experiments were conducted to assess the ability of the model to improve opinion retrieval by resolving implicit entities and features, showing the promise of our opinion retrieval approach when compared to state-of-the-art methods using text data from social networks.

Customers Sentiment on Banks

media has revolutionized the new-age customer's decision making through the myriads of sources available to them like online feedback or reviews, forum discussions, blogs and Twitter on the web. There is no need for them to depend on their peers any longer. When more convenient and efficient sources like user reviews are readily available to them over the internet. Vast and authentic information about all possible products ranges and services are at a click away. Even for commercial organization the task of gathering public opinion has been rendered tremendously easy, for the same reason that taking opinion polls and conducting surveys are now much simpler due to the abundance of information on the web. However, finding and monitoring opinion sites on the Web and filtering the information contained in them according to our need remains a difficult task because of the rapid increase in the number of distinct sites. Each site usually contains a huge volume of opinionated text which is difficult for any individual to go through. The average human reader will have difficulty identifying relevant sites and extracting and summarizing the opinions in them. Automated sentiment analysis systems are thus needed. This paper focuses on extracting the features from bank reviews taken from mouthshut.com and myBankTracker.com sites given by reviewers to state their opinions. This is done at aspect level of analysis using ontology. Then it determines whether they are positive or negative. Output of such analysis is then summarized.

Interaction in two journalistic genres

The study of interactive features of language has been a very productive source of insights into written discourse in recent years, revealing the ways that writers engage with readers to successfully persuade them of a particular viewpoint in a range of different genres and contexts. While a variety of approaches have illuminated our understanding of these features, the concept of interactional metadiscourse has been particularly valuable in revealing how writers project themselves into their discourse to signal their understandings of their material and their audience. In this paper we draw on Hyland’s (2005a) model of metadiscourse to explore some of the ways that interaction contributes to the success of two journalistic genres: popular science and opinion articles. Examining 200 popular science and 200 opinion texts, we show that despite the broadly similar audience and sources of these genres, authors structure their interactions very differently, contributing to the rhetorical distinctiveness of these genres. The paper not only offers a detailed account of interactional metadiscourse in these genres, but illustrates how interpersonal connections are accomplished for particular persuasive purposes in everyday public texts.

Scaling Politically Meaningful Dimensions Using Texts and Votes

Item response theory models for roll‐call voting data provide political scientists with parsimonious descriptions of political actors' relative preferences. However, models using only voting data tend to obscure variation in preferences across different issues due to identification and labeling problems that arise in multidimensional scaling models. We propose a new approach to using sources of metadata about votes to estimate the degree to which those votes are about common issues. We demonstrate our approach with votes and opinion texts from the U.S. Supreme Court, using latent Dirichlet allocation to discover the extent to which different issues were at stake in different cases and estimating justice preferences within each of those issues. This approach can be applied using a variety of unsupervised and supervised topic models for text, community detection models for networks, or any other tool capable of generating discrete or mixture categorization of subject matter from relevant vote‐specific metadata.

Analyzing Opinions and Argumentation in News Editorials and Op-Eds

Analyzing opinions and arguments in news editorials and op-eds is an interesting and a challenging task. The challenges lie in multiple levels – the text has to be analyzed in the discourse level (paragraphs and above) and also in the lower levels (sentence, phrase and word levels). The abundance of implicit opinions involving sarcasm, irony and biases adds further complexity to the task. The available methods and techniques on sentiment analysis and opinion mining are still much focused in the lower levels, i.e., up to the sentence level. However, the given task requires the application of the concepts from a number of closely related sub-disciplines – Sentiment Analysis, Argumentation Theory, Discourse Analysis, Computational Linguistics, Logic and Reasoning etc. The primary argument of this paper is that partial solutions to the problem can be achieved by developing linguistic resources and using them for automatically annotating the texts for opinions and arguments. This paper discusses the ongoing efforts in the development of linguistic resources for annotating opinionated texts, which are useful in the analysis of opinions and arguments in news editorials and op-eds.

Dos concepciones de los principios. Una respuesta a Juan Ruiz Manero

En este trabajo el autor replica a las críticas formuladas por J. Ruiz Manero en el artículo «A propósito de un último texto de Luigi Ferrajoli. Una nota sobre reglas, principios, “soluciones en abstracto” y “ponderaciones equitativas”», publicado en el número precedente de Doxa. El autor examina las diversas críticas dirigidas por Ruiz Manero, tanto en relación con su tipología de las normas regulativas como en lo que se refiere a sus tesis sobre las maneras de resolver las situaciones de conflicto (o concurso) entre principios. La conclusión central a la que llega el autor puede resumirse en lo siguiente: no infravalora en absoluto lo que llama «las buenas razones señaladas por Ruiz Manero en apoyo del enfoque principialista»; piensa, sin embargo, que todas estas ventajas pueden ser alcanzadas también por el enfoque garantista que él defiende, sin que este último enfoque tenga que pagar los importantes precios, sobre todo en relación con el debilitamiento de la normatividad de los principios constitucionales, que, en su opinión, vienen impuestos al principialismo por la teoría de la ponderación. La teoría de la ponderación, en opinión textual del autor, «permanece como el único impedimento para un buen tratado de paz entre nuestros diversos enfoques teóricos, basado en la integración de sus aparatos conceptuales y en la suma de sus buenas razones».

Research on Contrastive Viewpoint Summarization for Opinionated Texts

This paper presents a two-stage approach for multi-topic contrastive viewpoint summarization on opinionated texts. In the first stage, we model the opinionated texts with TAM and get the topic and aspect attribute of each sentence. In the second stage, we successively use the basic LexRank, Comparative LexRank, Topic-sensitive tf*idf LexRank, Topic-sensitive tf*idf & Comparative LexRank, and Biased & Comparative LexRank to evaluate the centrality of each sentence, based on which the summary is finally generated. Experimental results show that the best summary comes from the proposed Topic-sensitive tf*idf LexRank and Topic-sensitive tf*idf & Comparative LexRank.

Foreword to Special Issue

Parallel and distributed computing has been under many years of development, having played a central role in shaping different research and application trends such as grid computing, cloud computing, green computing, etc. The broad applications of parallel and distributed computing have also made the relevant research field interdisciplinary, cross boundaries among architectures, communications, computing, algorithms and programming. The objective of this special issue is to address some recent developments in this interdisciplinary area. The special issue is based on the presentations made at the 13th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing, Applications and Technologies (PDCAT 2012) held in Beijing, 14–16 December 2012. Fatima Furqan and Doan B. Hoang in their paper “Wireless Fair Intelligent Congestion Control — A Qos Performance Evaluation” propose a congestion control scheme in WiMAX Networks, by scheduling the traffic and ensuring the output buffer of base station operates around a target operating point without violating the QoS requirement of connections. The paper evaluates the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of throughput, delay and jitter for different classes of services under various parameter settings. A detailed simulation study on various settings of parameters is also carried out in NS-2. Yangyang Li, Hongbo Wang, Jiankang Dong, Junbo Li and Shiduan Cheng in their paper “Differentiated Bandwidth Guarantees for Cloud Data Centers” propose a differentiated bandwidth allocation scheme for data center networks, to guarantee network performance of applications and provide fine-grained service differentiation. The problem is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem and solved by a heuristic algorithm. Xu Liang, Youli Qu and Guixiang Ma in their paper “Research on Contrastive Viewpoint Summarization for Opinionated Texts” propose an approach for summarizing multi-topic contrastive viewpoints in opinionated text processing. They model the opinionated texts with Topic-Aspect Model and get the topic and aspect attribute of each sentence, and use some ranking methods to evaluate the centrality of each sentence, based on which the summary is finally generated. We sincerely thank all the authors and reviewers for their contributions to this special issue. Special thanks are given to Prof. Francis Lau, the EIC of JOIN, for

A modalização deôntica no artigo de opinião: força ilocutória regulada pelo contexto enunciativo

Este artigo nasce da necessidade de propor uma descrição dos elementos deônticos, considerando sua atuação no artigo de opinião. Nesse contexto enunciativo, verificam-se nuances da modalização deôntica que podem ser compreendidas dentro dos polos possibilidade- -necessidade, tendo em conta a relação que o produtor do texto estabelece com seu texto e com o interlocutor.

Teaching planning or sentence-combining strategies: Effective SRSD interventions at different levels of written composition

This study tested the effectiveness of two strategy-focused interventions aimed at promoting fifth and sixth graders’ opinion essay writing. Over 12 weekly 90-min lessons, two groups of 48 and 39 students received, respectively, planning and sentence-combining instruction, which followed the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) model. These intervention groups were compared with a practice control group of 39 students receiving standard writing instruction. The following main findings were noteworthy: (a) planning and sentence-combining instruction enhanced planning and sentence-construction skills, respectively; (b) both interventions increased opinion essay quality and text length; (c) planning instruction enhanced not only discourse-level writing but also some sentence- and word-level aspects of composition; (d) sentence-combining instruction enhanced not only sentence- and word-level writing but also some discourse-level aspects of composition; (e) after instruction, there was a correlation between self-efficacy and writing quality in both intervention groups; and (f) planning, but not sentence-combining, instructional effects generalized to summary writing.

Pessimists and optimists: Improving collaborative filtering through sentiment analysis

This work presents a novel application of Sentiment Analysis in Recommender Systems by categorizing users according to the average polarity of their comments. These categories are used as attributes in Collaborative Filtering algorithms. To test this solution a new corpus of opinions on movies obtained from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) has been generated, so both ratings and comments are available. The experiments stress the informative value of comments. By applying Sentiment Analysis approaches some Collaborative Filtering algorithms can be improved in rating prediction tasks. The results indicate that we obtain a more reliable prediction considering only the opinion text (RMSE of 1.868), than when apply similarities over the entire user community (RMSE of 2.134) and sentiment analysis can be advantageous to recommender systems.

An emotion‐based model of negation, intensifiers, and modality for polarity and intensity classification

Negation, intensifiers, and modality are common linguistic constructions that may modify the emotional meaning of the text and therefore need to be taken into consideration in sentiment analysis. Negation is usually considered as a polarity shifter, whereas intensifiers are regarded as amplifiers or diminishers of the strength of such polarity. Modality, in turn, has only been addressed in a very naïve fashion, so that modal forms are treated as polarity blockers. However, processing these constructions as mere polarity modifiers may be adequate for polarity classification, but it is not enough for more complex tasks (e.g., intensity classification), for which a more fine‐grained model based on emotions is needed. In this work, we study the effect of modifiers on the emotions affected by them and propose a model of negation, intensifiers, and modality especially conceived for sentiment analysis tasks. We compare our emotion‐based strategy with two traditional approaches based on polar expressions and find that representing the text as a set of emotions increases accuracy in different classification tasks and that this representation allows for a more accurate modeling of modifiers that results in further classification improvements. We also study the most common uses of modifiers in opinionated texts and quantify their impact in polarity and intensity classification. Finally, we analyze the joint effect of emotional modifiers and find that interesting synergies exist between them.

The Discourse System Recognized In The Jakarta Post’s Opinion Coloumn Entitled “Polycarpus Out On Parole: Resolve Munir’s Case” On December 05th, 2014

This study attempts to construe the discourse devices recognized in the article of Jakarta Post opinion column entitle ―Polycarpus out on Parole: Resolve Munir‘s Case‖ on December 05th, 2014 using meta-function strategy proposed by Martin and White (2005). The researcher found that the opinion text displays meta-function devices in different ways by using appraisal, ideation, conjunction, identification and periodicity to express their opinion with the related issue. The biggest parts used in appraisal are affect-attitude, judgment-attitude, and appreciation-attitude, force-graduation and focus-graduation. Besides using mono-gloss, the writers of the article also use hetero-gloss by projection, modality and concession or counter-expectancy. In the aspect of ideation, the researcher found that there are four kinds of figures, respectively, ‘doing, saying, sensing, and being. In terms of conjunction, it has been found that the writers of article use external and internal conjunction. To keep track of what is being talked about to the readers, the writers of article using ideation strategies by presenting, presuming, possessive, comparative, and text. At last, in terms of periodicity, the writers use themes, marked themes, and new in order to make the readers easier to grasp the meanings and the plot in the article. Keywords: Jakarta Post opinion article; meta-function system; appraisal; conjuction; ideation; periodicity.

The Discourse System Recognized In The Jakarta Post’s Opinion Coloumn Entitled “Polycarpus Out On Parole: Resolve Munir’s Case” On December 05th, 2014

This study attempts to construe the discourse devices recognized in the article of Jakarta Post opinion column entitle ―Polycarpus out on Parole: Resolve Munir‘s Case‖ on December 05th, 2014 using meta-function strategy proposed by Martin and White (2005). The researcher found that the opinion text displays meta-function devices in different ways by using appraisal, ideation, conjunction, identification and periodicity to express their opinion with the related issue. The biggest parts used in appraisal are affect-attitude, judgment-attitude, and appreciation-attitude, force-graduation and focus-graduation. Besides using mono-gloss, the writers of the article also use hetero-gloss by projection, modality and concession or counter-expectancy. In the aspect of ideation, the researcher found that there are four kinds of figures, respectively, ‘doing, saying, sensing, and being. In terms of conjunction, it has been found that the writers of article use external and internal conjunction. To keep track of what is being talked about to the readers, the writers of article using ideation strategies by presenting, presuming, possessive, comparative, and text. At last, in terms of periodicity, the writers use themes, marked themes, and new in order to make the readers easier to grasp the meanings and the plot in the article. Keywords: Jakarta Post opinion article; meta-function system; appraisal; conjuction; ideation; periodicity.

An emotional polarity analysis of consumers’ airline service tweets

Blogs and social networks have recently become a valuable resource for mining sentiments in fields as diverse as customer relationship management, public opinion tracking and text filtering. In fact, the knowledge obtained from social networks such as Twitter and Facebook has been shown to be extremely valuable to marketing research companies, public opinion organizations and other text mining entities. However, Web texts have been classified as noisy as they still pose considerable problems both at the lexical and the syntactic levels. In this research, we used a random sample of 2,105 tweets for sixteen commercial airlines to evaluate consumers’ sentiment towards airline service provided. We used an expert pre-defined lexicon to conduct the analysis. The lexicon includes around 6,800 seed adjectives with known orientation. Our results indicate a generally negative consumer sentiment towards commercial airline services, which suggests that most airline services are sub-optimal. Using both a qualitative and quantitative methodology to analyze airline service tweets, this study adds breadth and depth to the debate over airline service quality.

Oh, Tempora! Oh, Mores! Oh, Didier!

Oh, Tempora! Oh, Mores! Oh, Didier!