Intelligent Interface for Textual Attitude Analysis

This article describes a novel intelligent interface for attitude sensing in text driven by a robust computational tool for the analysis of fine-grained attitudes (emotions, judgments, and appreciations) expressed in text. The module responsible for textual attitude analysis was developed using a compositional linguistic approach based on the attitude-conveying lexicon, the analysis of syntactic and dependency relations between words in a sentence, the compositionality principle applied at various grammatical levels, the rules elaborated for semantically distinct verb classes, and a method considering the hierarchy of concepts. The performance of this module was evaluated on sentences from personal stories about life experiences. The developed web-based interface supports recognition of nine emotions, positive and negative judgments, and positive and negative appreciations conveyed in text. It allows users to adjust parameters, to enable or disable various functionality components of the algorithm, and to select the format of text annotation and attitude statistics visualization.