Grammar-based approaches to opinion mining

ESSLLI 2013 course, Düsseldorf, Germany

On this page are the PDF slides containing my course notes/presentations for the course I offered at European Summer School on Logic, Language, and Information (ESSLLI) in 2013. They are only very slightly edited from what I actually presented at ESSLLI.

Contents

• Introduction and motivation
• The slides
• Bibliography and background documents
• Use, attribution, and comments

The primary goals of this course were multiple:

1. to introduce the surrounding context and underlying concept of opinion mining to the ESSLLI participants, focusing particularly on opinion mining/sentiment analysis as the place where social context meets traditional grammatical concepts.
2. to present (in some depth, but limited) a selection of published advances over the past 10-12 years in opinion mining, focusing on motivations for including grammatical features.
3. to introduce some basic techniques and tools to the participants through descriptions and demos, including those that enable the use of rich grammatical constructs.
4. and to present my not-unbiased perspective and experience in opinion mining research and encourage participants to think about unresolved issues in the opinion mining field.

• Part 1: Opinion mining: the larger context
  • Sentiment analysis background: product reviews, debates.
  • Challenges of perspective, pragmatics.
  • Corpus-based social science
• Part 2: Corpora: they are necessary (8mb -- MAY take time to download)
  • Corpus requirements for supervised learning.
  • Examples of existing corpora (MPQA, JDPA).
  • Crowdsourcing for sentiment analysis.
• Part 3: This is not a machine learning course.
  • Sequence learning refresher (HMMs, CRFs, etc).
  • A little bit of graphical modeling.
• Part 4: You go with the sequences you got.
  • Supervised and/or sequence-based techniques.
    • Opinion source identification techniques.
    • Opinion target challenges.
• Part 5: But...but...GRAMMAR!
  • Processing grammatical structure to detect fine-grained opinions.
  • Our dystopian future.

I'm still working on updating the course bibliography, but the original unedited ESSLLI course application is here, including a number of references that also appeared during the course.

Feel free to use these materials as long as you give me the appropriate credit by mentioning me and (even better) giving a link back to my current home page. Contact me (spam avoidance: I will leave it to you to figure out how, but my home page has a very big clue) if you have any comments/requests/corrections that you want to make.