The language of emotion, ethics and aesthetics

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Appraisal Theory

• The language of emotion, ethics and aesthetics

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Introduction

• Appraisal is concerned with the linguistic
  formulations of conveying emotions and opinions,
  how writers align their authorial personae with
  the stance of others, and how they manipulate
  their writings to convey a greater or lesser
  degree of strength and conviction in their
  propositions.

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Presentation outline

• Systemic Functional Linguistics
• Appraisal resources
• Attitude
• Engagement
• Graduation
• Proposed research
• Preliminary experiments
• Discussion

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Systemic Functional Linguistics

• Systemic functional linguistics (Halliday 1994)
  identifies three metafunctions of language
  operating in parallel. Three levels of
  abstraction realise these types of meaning.

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Systemic Functional Linguistics

• Appraisal
• elaborates on the notion of interpersonal
  meaning, describing how social relationships are
  negotiated through evaluations of self, others
  and artefacts.
• is situated within discourse semantics
  attitude is often realised across grammatical
  boundaries, and is dynamic throughout a text.

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Appraisal resources
appraisal
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Attitude ways of feeling

• Appraisal considers three types of attitude
• Affect (personal emotion)
• Judgement (appraisal of others behaviour) and
• Appreciation (evaluation of phenomena).
• All three ways of feeling can be either positive
  or negative.

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Attitude ways of feeling
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Attitude ways of feeling

• Attitude can be realised
• explicitly, through the lexicogrammar (inscribed)
  or
• implicitly, through ideational meanings (invoked)
  that
• are marked with attitudinal lexical items
  (flagged)
• are elaborated by metaphor (provoked) or
• make reference to cultural attitudinal norms
  (afforded)

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Attitude ways of feeling

• We smashed their way of life.
• We brought the diseases. The alcohol.
• We committed the murders.
• We took the children from their mothers.
• We fenced them in like sheep.
• It was our ignorance and our prejudice.
• And our failure to imagine these things being
  done to us.

FLAGGED
PROVOKED
AFFORDED
INSCRIBED
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Engagement appraisals of appraisals

• Engagement considers how writers convey their
  point of view and how they align themselves with
  respect to the position of others.
• All utterances convey point of view (Stubbs 1996)
• All utterances occur among a variety of other
  utterances regarding the same topic (Bakhtin
  1981)
• Evaluative text is dialogic in that it responds
  to and anticipates the opinions of its audience
  and of other writers.

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Engagement appraisals of appraisals
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Graduation strength of evaluation
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Computational Linguistics and Appraisal Theory

• Taboada and Grieve (2004)
• Determined a potential value of adjectives for
  affect, judgement and appreciation by calculating
  the PMI with the pronoun-copular pairs
• I was (Affect)
• He was (Judgement) and
• It was (Appreciation).

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Computational Linguistics and Appraisal Theory

• Whitelaw et al. (2005)
• Appraisal Groups are the atomic elements for
  sentiment analysis.
• Attitude affect judgement appreciation
• Orientation positive negative
• Force low neutral high
• Focus low neutral high
• Polarity marked unmarked
• Lexicon of frames constructed from WordNet, using
  the seed terms provided by Martin and White
  (2005).

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Proposed research

• Aim
• Investigate techniques for the computational
  analysis of Appraisal
• identifying appraisal-bearing propositions, and
• labelling the constituents of the propositions
  according to the attitude, engagement and
  graduation typologies.

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Proposed research

• Motivation
• Extend the breadth of sentiment analysis by
• discriminating between affect, judgement and
  appreciation
• determining author positioning with respect to
  others and
• accounting for the vast range of linguistic
  features that serve to modify inscribed attitude
  and engagement.
• Seek to statistically validate the Appraisal
  typologies.

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Proposed research

• Building an Appraisal Lexicon
• The Appraisal typology might be populated
  semi-automatically by comparing the
  distributional similarity of target words with
  terms known to be appropriate to each node (as
  demonstrated by Weeds et al. (2005) for
  biomedical ontologies).

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Proposed research

• Finding patterns of Appraisal
• The automatically acquired lexicon might be used
  to label sentences according to the type of
  attitude, engagement and graduation. Dependency
  parses of these sentences may reveal significant
  lexicogrammatical patterns of appraisal
  propositions.

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Proposed research

• Augmenting similarity measures with Appraisal
  annotations
• The lexicogrammatical patterns of Appraisal might
  be used to provide additional features for
  semantic spaces (following Padó and Lapata
  (2004)). Can these features motivated from
  Appraisal Theory bootstrap the performance of
  metric in identifying words of attitude,
  engagement and graduation?

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Proposed research

• Challenges
• Selecting seed terms
• Some contexts confound the cultural norms
• unpredictable behaviour vs. unpredictable plot
• Infused graduation
• disquieted, startled, frightened, terrified

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Preliminary experiments

• Similar words appear in similar contexts (Firth
  1957)
• Can context determine Attitude?
• Collect examples of Attitude
• Cluster these examples using SenseClusters
  (Kulkarni and Pedersen 2005)

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Preliminary experiments

• Data collection
• Martin and Whites (2005) example adjectives
• Discarded 64 ambiguous terms
• Discarded 151 terms with low probability mass
• Extracted paragraphs from the BNC if they
  contained one of the 168 remaining adjectives

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Preliminary experiments

• Experiments with SenseClusters

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Thank you!

• David Hope drh21_at_sussex.ac.uk
• Jonathon Read j.l.read_at_sussex.ac.uk