Cover not available

In:The Functional Perspective on Language and Discourse: Applications and implications
Edited by María de los Ángeles Gómez González, Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco Gonzálvez-García and Angela Downing
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 247] 2014
► pp. 87–110

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload Book PDF
authorization required

Form and function in evaluative language

The use of corpora to identify context valence shifters in a linguistically-motivated sentiment analysis system

 | University of Málaga, Spain
 | University of Málaga, Spain
Published online: 16 May 2014
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.247.05mor
In this paper we summarise current research in the analysis of evaluative language, both from a linguistic and a NLP perspective, and offer a description of the approaches that have been proposed, to focus on the use of text corpora as a common resource employed by practitioners of both disciplines. We then present some of the work carried out by our research team, Tecnolengua, that has concentrated on the construction of a domain-neutral, linguistically-motivated sentiment analysis tool, which makes extensive use of lexical resources of various types. Among such resources, the inclusion of multiword expressions in our database is a key factor in the improved performance of Sentitext, as they play an integral role in the creation of the context rules we use to account for those cases in which the assigned valence of an individual word is modified by its surrounding linguistic environment.
References (72)
References
Andreevskaia, Alina, and Sabine Bergler. 2007. “CLaC and CLaC-NB: Knowledge-based and Corpus-based Approaches to Sentiment Tagging.” In Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluations, 117–120. Prague, Czech Republic: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Atserias, Jordi, Bernardino Casas, Elisabet Cornelles, Meritxell González, Lluis Padró, and Muntsa Padró. 2006. “FreeLing 1.3: Syntactic and Semantic Services in an Open-source NLP Library.” In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation , 2281–2286. Genova, Italy.
Aue, Anthony, and Michael Gamon. 2005. “Customizing Sentiment Classifiers to New Domains: A Case Study.” In Proceedings of Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP). Borovets, Bulgaria. Available at: [URL]
Bakhtin, M. M. 1953. “The Problem of Speech Genres.” In Speech Genres and Other Late Essays , ed. by C. Emerson, and M. Holquist, 60–102. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Balahur, Alexandra, Zornitsa Kozareva, and Andrés Montoyo. 2009. “Determining the Polarity and Source of Opinions Expressed in Political Debates.” In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, CICLing ’09 468–480. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barnbrook, J., and John Sinclair. 1995. “Parsing Cobuild Entries.” In The Languages of Definition: The Formalisation of Dictionary Definitions for Natural Language Processing , ed. by J. ­Sinclair, M. Hoelter, and C. Peters, 13–58. Luxemburg: European Commission.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bednarek, Monika. 2006. Evaluation in Media Discourse: Analysis of a Newspaper Corpus . Research in Corpus and Discourse. London: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2008. Emotion Talk Across Corpora . New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, D. 2006. “Stance in Spoken and Written University Registers. ” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 5: 97–116. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, and Edward Finegan. 1998. “Adverbial Stance Types in English. ” Discourse Processes 11: 1–34. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey N. Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English .London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Boldrini, Ester, Alexandra Balahur, Patricio Martínez-Barco, and Andrés Montoyo. 2009. “EmotiBlog: An Annotation Scheme for Emotion Detection and Analysis in Non-traditional Textual Genres.” In Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Data Mining , 491–497. Las Vegas, USA: CSREA Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brooke, Julian, M. Tofiloski, and Maite Taboada. 2009. “Cross-Linguistic Sentiment Analysis: From English to Spanish.” In Proceedings of RANLP 2009, Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing , 50–54. Borovets, Bulgaria.
Bublitz, W. 2003. “Emotive Prosody: How Attitudinal Frames Help Construct Context.” In Anglistentag 2002, Bayreuth – Proceedings , ed. by E. Mengel, H. Schmid, and M. Steppat, 381–391. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Buhler, K. 1934. Speachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion Der Sprache . Jena: Fisher.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Caffi, Claudia, and Richard W. Janney. 1994. “Towards a Pragmatics of Emotive Communication.” Journal of Pragmatics 22: 325–373.
Carter, Ronald. 2004. Language and Creativity . London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Conrad, Susan, and Douglas Biber. 2000. “Beyond Exchange: Appraisal Systems in English.” In Evaluation in Texts. Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse , ed. by Susan Hunston, and Geoffrey Thompson, 56–73. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cruz, Fermín, José A. Troyano, Fernando Enríquez, and Javier Ortega. 2008. “Clasificación de documentos basada en la opinión: Experimentos con un corpus de críticas de cine en español. [A classification of documents based on opinion: Experiments with a corpus of movie reviews in Spanish].” Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural 41: 73–80.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dirven, René. 1997. “Emotions as Cause and the Cause of Emotions”. In The Language of Emotions , ed. by Susanne Niemeier, and René Dirven, 55–86. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Englebretson, Robert. 2007. Stancetaking in Discourse . Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 2001. Language and Power . ( 2nd Revised Edition ). Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Firth, John R. 1957. “A Synopsis of Linguistic Theory, 1930–1955.” Studies in Linguistic Analysis . Special Volume, Philological Society . 1–32.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Francis, Gill, Susan Hunston, and Elizabeth Manning. 1996. Collins Cobuild Grammar Patterns 1: Verbs . London: Harper Collins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1998. Collins Cobuild Grammar Patterns 2: Nouns and Adjectives . London: Harper Collins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gamon, Michael, and Anthony Aue. 2005. “Automatic Identification of Sentiment Vocabulary: Exploiting Low Association with Known Sentiment Terms.” In Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Feature Engineering for Machine Learning in Natural Language Processing, 57–64. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goodwin, Charles, and M. Goodwin. 2000. “Emotion Within Situated Activity”. In Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader , ed. by A. Duranti, 239–257. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Halliday, Michael A. K. 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2nd Ed.) . London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Harkins, Jean, and Anna Wierzbicka. 2001. Emotions in Cross-linguistic Perspective . Berlin: ­Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hatzivassiloglou, Vasileios, and Kathleen R. McKeown. 1997. “Predicting the Semantic Orientation of Adjectives.” In Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 174–181. Madrid, Spain: Association for ­Computational Linguistics.
Huddleston, Rodney D., and Geoffrey K. Pullum (eds). 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hunston, Susan. 1994. “Evaluation and the Planes of Discourse: Status and Value in Persuasive Texts.” In Advances in Written Text Analysis , ed. by Michael Coulthard, 191–218. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hunston, Susan, and Gill Francis. 1999. Pattern Grammar: A Corpus-Driven Approach to the Lexical Grammar of English . Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hunston, Susan, and John Sinclair. 2000. “A Local Grammar of Evaluation.” In Evaluation in Texts. Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse , ed. by Susan Hunston, and ­Geoffrey Thompson, 75–100. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hunston, Susan. 2011. Corpus Approaches to Evaluation. Phraseology and Evaluative Language . New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hunston, Susan, and Geoff Thompson (eds). 2000. Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse . Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hyland, Ken. 2009. “Corpus Informed Discourse Analysis: The Case of Academic Engagement.” In Academic Writing: At the Interface Between Corpus and Discourse , ed. by Maggie Charles, Diane Pecorati, and Susan Hunston, 110–128. London: Continuum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Janney, Richard W. 1996. Speech and Affect. Emotive Uses of English . Munich: R. W. Janney.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Julian, P. 2009. An Exploration of Strategies to Convey Evaluation in the “Notebook” Texts . ­University of Birmingham: Unpublished PhD Thesis.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kennedy, Alistair, and Diana Inkpen. 2006. “Sentiment Classification of Movie Reviews Using Contextual Valence Shifters. ” Computational Intelligence 22 (2): 110–125. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kövecses, Zoltán. 2000. Metaphor and Emotion. Language, Culture and Body in Human Feeling . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey N. 1994. Semantics . Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Louw, William E. 1993. “Irony in the Text or Insincerity in the Writer?” In Text and Technology , ed. by Mona Baker, Gill Francis, and Elena Tognini-Bonelli, 157–176. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2000. “Contextual Prosodic Theory: Bringing Semantic Prosodies to Life.” In Words in Context: A Tribute to John Sinclair on His Retirement , ed. by C. Heffer, H. Sautson, and G. Fox, 48–94. Birmingham: University of Birmingham.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics . Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Martin James R. 2000. “Beyond Exchange: Appraisal Systems in English.” In Evaluation in Texts. Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse , ed. by Susan Hunston, and Geoffrey Thompson, 142–175. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Martin James R., and Peter R. R. White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English . Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Moreno-Ortiz, Antonio, Francisco Pineda Castillo, and Rodrigo Hidalgo García. 2010. “Análisis de valoraciones de usuario de hoteles con Sentitext: Un sistema de análisis de sentimiento independiente del dominio [An analysis of hotel users reviews with Sentitext: A domain-neutral analysis of sentiment].” Procesamiento de Lenguaje Natural 45: 31–39.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Moreno-Ortiz, Antonio, Chantal Pérez-Hernández, and Rodrigo Hidalgo-García. 2011. “Domain-neutral, Linguistically-motivated Sentiment Analysis: A Performance Evaluation.” In Actas Del XXVII Congreso De La Sociedad Española Para El Procesamiento Del Lenguaje Natural , 847–856.
Padró, Lluís. 2011. “Analizadores multilingües en FreeLing [Multilingual analysers in Free­Ling]. ” Linguamatica 3 (2): 13–20.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Painter, Claire. 2003. “Developing Attitude: An Ontogenetic Perspective on Appraisal. ” Text 23 (2): 183–209.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pang, Bo, and Lillian Lee. 2004. “A Sentimental Education: Sentiment Analysis Using Subjectivity Summarisation Based on Minimum Cuts.” In Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics , 271–278. Barcelona, Spain: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2005. “Seeing Stars: Exploiting Class Relationships for Sentiment Categorisation with Respect to Rating Scales.” In Proceedings of ACL 2005 , 115–124. ­Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2008. “Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis. ” Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval 2 (1–2): 2–135.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Parrott, W. Gerrod. 2001. Emotions in Social Psycology . Philadelphia: Psychology Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Polanyi, Livia, and Annie Zaenen. 2006. “Contextual Valence Shifters.” In Computing Attitude and Affect in Text: Theory and Applications , ed. by James G. Shanahan, and Yan Qu, 1–10. Dordrecht: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey N. Leech, and Jan Svartvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language . Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Riloff, Ellen, and Janyce Wiebe. 2003. “Learning Extraction Patterns for Subjective Expressions.” In Proceedings of the 2003 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP’03 . 105–112. Stroudsburg, PA, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rothery, Joan and Maree Stenglin. 2000. “Interpreting Literature: The Role of APPRAISAL.” In Researching Language in Schools and Functional Linguistics, ed. by Len Unsworth, 222–244. London: Cassell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Russell, Stuart, and Peter Norvig. 2010. Artifical Intelligence: A Modern Approach . Boston: ­Prentice Hall.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Selting, Margret. 1994. “Emphatic Speech Style – with Special Focus on the Prosodic Signalling of Heightened Emotive Involvement in Conversation. ” Journal of Pragmatics 22: 375–408. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Sinclair, John. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation: Describing English Language . Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1996. “The Search for Units of Meaning. ” Textus IX (1): 75–106.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2004. Trust the Text: Language, Corpus and Discourse . London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Steward, Dominic. 2010. Semantic Prosody: A Critical Evaluation . New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stubbs, Michael. 2001. Words and Phrases. Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics . Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Taboada, Maite, Julian Brooks, Milan Tofiloski, Kimberly Voll, and Manfred Stede. 2011. “­Lexicon-Based Methods for Sentiment Analysis. ” Computational Linguistics 37 (2): 267–307. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Thompson, Geoffrey, and Susan Hunston. 2000. “Evaluation: An Introduction.” In Evaluation in Texts. Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse , ed. by Susan Hunston, and Geoffrey Thompson, 1–27. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Turney, Peter D. 2002. “Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down? Semantic Orientation Applied to Unsupervised Classification of Reviews.” In Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) , 417–424. Philadelphia, USA.
Van Dijk, Teun A. 1998. “Opinions and Ideology in the Press.” In Approaches to Media Discourse , ed. by A. Bell, and P. Garret, 21–63. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Weigand, Edda (ed). 2004. Emotion in Dialogic Interaction. Advances in the Complex . (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 248). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Parviz, Muhammed, Alireza Jalilifar & Alexanne Don
2024. Unpacking Evaluative Meaning-Making Resources in Verbal Movie Descriptions: A Comparative Study of Native and Non-Native English Speakers. Sage Open 14:4 DOI logo
Su, Hang & Susan Hunston
2019. Language patterns and attitude revisited. Functions of Language 26:3 ► pp. 343 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue