Identifying subjective statements in news titles using a personal sense annotation framework

Subjective language contains information about private states. The goal of subjective language identification is to determine that a private state is expressed, without considering its polarity or specific emotion. A component of word meaning, “Personal Sense,” has clear potential in the field of subjective language identification, as it reflects a meaning of words in terms of unique personal experience and carries personal characteristics. In this paper we investigate how Personal Sense can be harnessed for the purpose of identifying subjectivity in news titles. In the process, we develop a new Personal Sense annotation framework for annotating and classifying subjectivity, polarity, and emotion. The Personal Sense framework yields high performance in a fine-grained subsentence subjectivity classification. Our experiments demonstrate lexico-syntactic features to be useful for the identification of subjectivity indicators and the targets that receive the subjective Personal Sense.