Have we had Hard Times or Cosy Times? A Discourse Analysis of Opinions

Expressed over Socio-political Events in News Editorials

Bal Krishna BalInformation and Language Processing

Research Lab, Kathmandu University, Nepal

Patrick Saint-DizierIRIT, France

IRIT

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Aims

Conducting a Discourse Analysis over a common topic in multiple News Editorials

Aims

Identifying the Argumentation Structure in News Editorials

What makes Discourse Analysis in News Editorials challenging?

Discourse of arguments span to much higher levels than a sentence. Should I necessarily buy in by the persuasion involved? Persuasive

texts often involve sponsored facts and convincing yet misleading

arguments. Understanding and processing of the text made difficult by the

presence of exaggerations, sarcasms, irony and biases. Knowledge of previous discourses and contexts required to

completely understand the text. The argumentation structure of editorials does not necessarily

represent the standard forms of argumentation. Validity and strengths of an argument are not equivalent terms. 4

Research Challenges Identifying the argumentation structure and the persuasion strength exhibited by the arguments. Identifying the different discourse units and rhetorical relations.

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Solution Approach In the Discourse level

Apply the relevant concepts from a closely related sub disciplines of discourse analysis – argumentation theory, logic and practical reasoning, rhetorical analysis etc.

In the Sentence and Lexical levels Syntactic and Semantic analysis of the text Make a distinction between facts and opinions Determining the subjectivity of expressions Determining the orientation or polarity of subjective expressions Determining the strength of the orientation of the subjective expressions

Some related works:•Works on Argumentation in texts (conclusion and supports and the links between them) (Hoffman, 2007; Kirschner et. al, 2003; Moens et. al, 2007; Prakken et. al, 2003; Walton, 1996);•Works on Rhetorical relations in discourse analysis : supports and their role in discourse (Marcu, 1997; Manfred and Saurmann, 2008);• Annotation of Opinions and Expressions in texts - (Wiebe et. al, 2005; Veselin and Claire, 2004;Rosenburg et. al, 2004; Wilson, 2003; Miltsakaki et. al, 2004)•Opinion Mining and generic problems

i) Identifying the subjective and objective expressions in texts (Esuli and Sebastiani, 2006);

ii) Determining the orientation or polarity of subjective expressions (Hatzivassiloglou and Wiebe,2000); iii) Determining the strength of subjective expressions (Wilson et. al, 2005; Martin and White,2005; Read et. al, 2007; Tabodoa et. al, 2004).

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Towards a Discourse Analysis of Events in Editorials

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Attr = Attributes = <Source, Date, Orientation, Strength, Commitment Level, Conditional Level>

Persuasion effects in texts Supports (Positive/Negative)+Rhetorical relations

Editorials

---

Common Theme

= Conclusion{Attr} Event 1

Event 2

Event 3

Event n

Support 1

{Attr}

Support n

{Attr}

---

Rhetorical relations

Argumentation

Towards an annotation scheme

Tag Possible values

argument_type Support, Conclusion, Rhetorical relations

date Date of publication of the editorial

source Source or name of the newspaper

orientation_support For, Against

commitment Modal, Low, High

conditional Yes. No

direct strength Low, Average, High

relative strength Low, Average, High

persuasion strength Low, Average, High

rhetorical_relation_type Justification, Contrast, Exemplification, Discourse frame, Elaboration, Paraphrase, Cause-effect, Result, Explanation, Reinforcement

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Outlining the supports and Rhetorical relations in editorials

Conclusion: (<Date: 2009-07-17>, <Source: Nepali Times >,<Orientation: Negative>,<Strength : High>)[Nepal] is in crisis.

Support: (<ID:1>,<Date: 2009-07-17 >,<Source : Nepali Times>,<Orientation: Negative, Support Type: For>,<Strength: High>)Because of stagnating economy, falling farm productivity, rising population and negative job creation.

Rhetorical_relation: Cause-effect(1,2)

Support: (<ID:2>,<Date: 2009-07-17 >,<Source : Nepali Times>,<Orientation: Negative, Support Type: For>,<Strength: High>)All these point to a looming disaster.

Rhetorical_relation: Paraphrase (2,3)

Support: (<ID:3>,<Date: 2009-07-17 >,<Source : Nepali Times>,<Orientation: Negative, Support Type: For>,<Strength: High>)Combined they will have political repercussions for whoever rules Nepal in the coming years.

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Basic linguistic marks in persuasive texts (editorials)

Premise indicators Conclusion indicators

Because… Therefore…

Since… Consequently…

In light of… Hence…

Whereas… So…

Given that… Thus…

For the reason that… In conclusion…

For.. Accordingly…

It follows that…

As a result…

Some key points to consider if it is an argumentative text: • Does the author attempt to convince the listener or reader?• Is the author trying to make claims (conclusions) providing reasons or supports?

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Some of the opinion patterns in Editorials

Pattern type Orientation Example

Negation + term of expression or positive verbs

Negative No controlWithout the voting taking place

Expression + negative nouns

Negative New records in violence and extortionHeight of anarchy, impunity, lawlessness

Neither + positive adjective + nor + positive adjective

Negative Neither keen nor competent

Corpus collection and annotation

Theme Size Period Source

Socio-political

(Peace and

stability)

Total themes –

60 (30 positive

and 30 negative)

500 editorials,

8000 sentences

Start of 2006-

Mid of 2009

The Kathmandu

Post, Nepali

Times, Spotlight,

New York Times,

Washington

Times, The

Hindu Express

The corpus has been annotated using the semantic tagset described above by two annotators. .The highest inter-annotator disagreement rate is noted for the tag Expression_Type (Fact, Opinion, Undefined)

Perspectives

• Analysis of Rhetorical relations and their role in argumentation• Mapping predefined biases and beliefs of journals with what they write• Analysis of opinions over a large time span• Constructing a synthesis of opinions over a particular topic from editorials• Building a computation model for analyzing and synthesizing opinions in news editorials• Corpus validation and results

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Preliminary thoughts on the High Level Implementation model

Opinion Analysis at the

Lexical and Sentence Levels

Opinion and Argumentation

Analysis at the Discourse Level

Multiple Editorials on a common theme or event

Synthesis of Analyzed Opinion

and Argumentation

Synthesis of arguments and opinions from editorials

Opinion analyzed text in the lexical and sentence levels

Opinion and argumentation analyzed text in the Discourse Level

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Thank You