Active learning for detection of stance components

Maria Skeppstedt, Magnus Sahlgren, Carita Paradis, Andreas Kerren


Abstract
Automatic detection of five language components, which are all relevant for expressing opinions and for stance taking, was studied: positive sentiment, negative sentiment, speculation, contrast and condition. A resource-aware approach was taken, which included manual annotation of 500 training samples and the use of limited lexical resources. Active learning was compared to random selection of training data, as well as to a lexicon-based method. Active learning was successful for the categories speculation, contrast and condition, but not for the two sentiment categories, for which results achieved when using active learning were similar to those achieved when applying a random selection of training data. This difference is likely due to a larger variation in how sentiment is expressed than in how speakers express the other three categories. This larger variation was also shown by the lower recall results achieved by the lexicon-based approach for sentiment than for the categories speculation, contrast and condition.
Anthology ID:
W16-4306
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Modeling of People’s Opinions, Personality, and Emotions in Social Media (PEOPLES)
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Malvina Nissim, Viviana Patti, Barbara Plank
Venue:
PEOPLES
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
50–59
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-4306
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Maria Skeppstedt, Magnus Sahlgren, Carita Paradis, and Andreas Kerren. 2016. Active learning for detection of stance components. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Modeling of People’s Opinions, Personality, and Emotions in Social Media (PEOPLES), pages 50–59, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Active learning for detection of stance components (Skeppstedt et al., PEOPLES 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-4306.pdf