Extracting opinion expressions and their polarities – exploration of pipelines and joint models

We investigate systems that identify opinion expressions and assigns polarities to the extracted expressions. In particular, we demonstrate the benefit of integrating opinion extraction and polarity classification into a joint model using features reflecting the global polarity structure. The model is trained using large-margin structured prediction methods. The system is evaluated on the MPQA opinion corpus, where we compare it to the only previously published end-to-end system for opinion expression extraction and polarity classification. The results show an improvement of between 10 and 15 absolute points in F-measure.