Multilingual opinion holder identification using author and authority viewpoints

Opinion holder identification research is important for discriminating between opinions that are viewed from different perspectives. We propose a new opinion holder identification method that is based on a differentiation between the author and authority viewpoints in opinionated sentences. In our method, the author- and authority-opinionated sentences were extracted, respectively, by utilizing the different features because their writing styles were different. Although the researchers have not focused on it, this differentiation is important for correctly identifying opinion holders. We describe our participation in the NTCIR-6 Opinion Analysis Pilot Task by focusing on the opinion holder identification results in Japanese and English. The evaluation results showed that our system performed fairly well with respect to Japanese documents, and postsubmission analysis has revealed that improvements could be made with respect to English documents as well.