Limits of opinion-finding baseline systems

ABSTRACT

In opinion-finding, the retrieval system is tasked with retrieving not just relevant documents, but which also express an opinion towards the query target entity. Most opinion-finding systems are based on a two-stage approach, where initially the system aims to retrieve relevant documents, which are then re-ranked according to the extent to which they are detected to be of an opinionated nature. In this work, we investigate how the underlying 'baseline' retrieval system performance affects the overall opinion-finding performance. We apply two effective opinion-finding techniques to all the baseline runs submitted to the TREC 2007 Blog track, and draw new insights and conclusions.

REFERENCES

• 1: D. Hannah, C. Macdonald, B. He, J. Peng, and I. Ounis. University of Glasgow at TREC 2007: Experiments in Blog and Enterprise Tracks with Terrier. In Proceedings of TREC 2007.
• 2: Ben He , Craig Macdonald , Iadh Ounis, Ranking opinionated blog posts using OpinionFinder, Proceedings of the 31st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, July 20-24, 2008, Singapore, Singapore [doi>10.1145/1390334.1390473]
• 3: C. Macdonald, I. Ounis, and I. Soboroff. Overview of the TREC 2007 Blog Track. In Proceedings of TREC 2007.
• 4: I. Ounis, M. de Rijke, C. Macdonald, G. Mishne, and I. Soboroff. Overview of the TREC 2006 Blog Track. In Proceedings of TREC 2006.
• 5: Theresa Wilson , Paul Hoffmann , Swapna Somasundaran , Jason Kessler , Janyce Wiebe , Yejin Choi , Claire Cardie , Ellen Riloff , Siddharth Patwardhan, OpinionFinder: a system for subjectivity analysis, Proceedings of HLT/EMNLP on Interactive Demonstrations, p.34-35, October 07-07, 2005, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada [doi>10.3115/1225733.1225751]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval

General Terms:
Experimentation, Performance

Keywords:
baselines, opinion finding