Appraisal Extraction for News Opinion Analysis at NTCIR-6

We describe a system which uses lexical shallow parsing to find adjectival “appraisal groups” in sentences, which convey a positive or negative appraisal of an item. We used a simple heuristic to detect opinion holders, determining whether a person was being quoted in a specific sentence or not, and if so, who. We also explored the the use of unsupervised learners and voting to increase our coverage.