Using Anaphora Resolution to Improve Opinion Target Identification in Movie Reviews

Current work on automatic opinion mining has ignored opinion targets expressed by anaphorical pronouns, thereby missing a significant number of opinion targets. In this paper we empirically evaluate whether using an off-the-shelf anaphora resolution algorithm can improve the performance of a baseline opinion mining system. We present an analysis based on two different anaphora resolution systems. Our experiments on a movie review corpus demonstrate, that an unsupervised anaphora resolution algorithm significantly improves the opinion target extraction. We furthermore suggest domain and task specific extensions to an off-the-shelf algorithm which in turn yield significant improvements.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Niklas Jakob, Iryna Gurevych
• Keywords: ACL 2010, Anaphora Resolution, Computational Linguistics, Opinion Mining, Opinion Target