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Can predicate-argument structures be used for contextual opinion retrieval from blogs?

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Abstract

We present the results of our investigation on the use of predicate-argument structures for contextual opinion retrieval. The use of predicate-argument structure for opinion retrieval is a novel approach that exploits the grammatical derivation of sentences to show contextual and subjective relevance. We do not use frequency of certain keywords as it is usually done in keyword-based opinion retrieval approaches. Rather, our novel solution is based on frequency of contextually relevant and subjective sentences. We use a linear relevance model that leverages semantic similarities among predicate-argument structures of sentences. Thus, this paper presents the evaluation results of the linear relevance model. The model does a linear combination of a popular relevance model, our proposed transformed terms similarity model, and the absolute value of a sentence subjectivity scoring scheme. The predicate-argument structures are derived from the grammatical derivations of natural language query topics and the well formed sentences from blog documents. The derived predicate-argument structures are then semantically compared to compute an opinion relevance score. Our scoring technique uses the highest frequency of semantically related predicate-argument structures enriched with the total subjectivity score from sentences. Evaluation and experimental results show that predicate-argument structures can indeed be used for contextual opinion retrieval as it improves performance of opinion retrieval task by 15% over the popular TREC baselines.

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  1. Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Sunway Campus, Bandar Sunway, Malaysia

    Sylvester O. Orimaye, Saadat M. Alhashmi & Eu-Gene Siew

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  1. Sylvester O. Orimaye
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Orimaye, S.O., Alhashmi, S.M. & Siew, EG. Can predicate-argument structures be used for contextual opinion retrieval from blogs?. World Wide Web 16, 763–791 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-012-0170-8

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