Monitoring the Web Sentiment, The Italian Prime Minister´s Case

The world has fundamentally changed as the Internet has become a universal means of communication. The Web is a huge virtual space where to express individual opinions and influence any aspect of life. Internet contains a wealth of data that can be mined to detect valuable opinions, with implications even in the political arena. Nowadays the Web sources are more accessible and valuable than ever before, but most of the times the true valuable information is hidden in thousands of textual pages. Their transformation into information is therefore strongly linked to their automatic lexical analysis and semantic synthesis. This poster describes a Knowledge Mining study performed on over 1000 news articles or posts in forum/blogs, concerning the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, involved last year in the sexual scandal. All these textual contributions have been Morpho-Syntactically analysed, Semantically Role labelled and Clustered in order to find meaningful similarities, hilite possible hidden relationships and evaluate their sentiment polarity.