Weakly-supervised Appraisal Analysis

Abstract

This article is concerned with the computational treatment of Appraisal, a Systemic Functional Linguistic theory of the types of language employed to communicate opinion in English. The theoryconsiders aspects such as Attitude (how writers communicate theirpoint of view), Engagement (how writers align themselves with respectto the opinions of others) and Graduation (how writers amplify ordiminish their attitudes and engagements).  To analyse text according to the theory we employ a weakly-supervised approach to text classification, which involves comparing the similarity of words with prototypical examples of classes. We evaluate the method's performance using a collection of book reviews annotated according to the Appraisal theory.