Opinion Analysis in Newspaper Editorials

When: Friday, January 22, 2016
Where: PGH 232
Time: 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Speaker: Bal Krishna, University of Houston

Host: Dr. Subhlok & Dr. Gnawali

Editorials and opinion articles in general express their views or opinions about some particular event or happening. These views or opinions are meant to influence or convince the readers and hence may resort to any means of expression in the text in order to make the text sound convincing. In order to support one's thesis or statement, the author may produce facts or mere opinions in disguise of facts. It can also involve exaggerations, sarcasm and irony, biases etc. This makes analyzing the opinions and the argumentation structure in editorials quite a challenging task.

Existing research problems in Opinion Mining are still too focused in the the lower levels, viz., lexical, phrase and sentence levels. Even in these lower levels, issues regarding inadequate lexicon coverage and poor adaptability of the lexicons in cross-domain situations prevail. There are increasing trends of the use of machine learning approaches for solving one or more of these tasks but as the scope of the analysis and synthesis gets wider together with the involvement of multiple attributes for the task, the role of lexicon and dictionary based approaches along with the data and patterns from the corpus becomes quite prominent. The given work extends the analysis of opinions in the paragraph level by borrowing the concepts like" opening-statement-thesis" and "supports" from argumentation theory and "rhetorical relations" from rhetorical structure theory and discourse analysis. A synthesis of opinions and arguments from multiple sources is conducted based on the analyses of opinions in the lexical, phrase, sentence and paragraph levels in the form of annotations.

Bio:

I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Houston and a tenured track Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Kathmandu University, Nepal since 2009.  I have been in the Software Localization industry since 2005 being involved in several multinational Projects like the PAN Localization Project, http://panl10n.net which involved software localization in 11 countries in South and South east Asia. Since then, I have also been offering consulting services to the major software giants in quite a few software localization Projects. Having worked in the software localization industry in different roles as a Software Developer, Translator, Reviewer, Team Lead and Project Manager for about a decade, I bring in the knowledge and wider perspective of the different aspects of software localization in real world Projects.