Have we had Hard Times or Cosy Times? A Discourse Analysis of Opinions Expressed over Socio-political Events in News Editorials Bal Krishna Bal Information and Language Processing Research Lab, Kathmandu University, Nepal Patrick Saint-Dizier IRIT, France IRIT 1

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. 5 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). 6

Towards a Discourse Analysis of Events in Editorials 7 Attr = Attributes = 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 TagPossible values argument_typeSupport, Conclusion, Rhetorical relations dateDate of publication of the editorial sourceSource or name of the newspaper orientation_supportFor, Against commitmentModal, Low, High conditionalYes. No direct strengthLow, Average, High relative strengthLow, Average, High persuasion strengthLow, Average, High rhetorical_relation_typeJustification, Contrast, Exemplification, Discourse frame, Elaboration, Paraphrase, Cause-effect, Result, Explanation, Reinforcement 8

Outlining the supports and Rhetorical relations in editorials Conclusion: (,,, ) [Nepal] is in crisis. Support: (,,,, ) Because of stagnating economy, falling farm productivity, rising population and negative job creation. Rhetorical_relation: Cause-effect(1,2) Support: (,,,, ) All these point to a looming disaster. Rhetorical_relation: Paraphrase (2,3) Support: (,,,, ) Combined they will have political repercussions for whoever rules Nepal in the coming years. 9

Basic linguistic marks in persuasive texts (editorials) Premise indicatorsConclusion 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? 10

11 Some of the opinion patterns in Editorials Pattern typeOrientationExample Negation + term of expression or positive verbs NegativeNo control Without the voting taking place Expression + negative nouns NegativeNew records in violence and extortion Height of anarchy, impunity, lawlessness Neither + positive adjective + nor + positive adjective NegativeNeither keen nor competent

Corpus collection and annotation ThemeSizePeriodSource Socio-political (Peace and stability) Total themes – 60 (30 positive and 30 negative) 500 editorials, 8000 sentences Start of 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 13

14 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

15 Thank You