Exploiting Subjectivity Classificationto Improve Information Extraction

Ellen Riloff University of Utah

Janyce Wiebe University of Pittsburgh

William Phillips University of Utah

Subjectivity ?

• Definition: Subjective language expresses or refers to opinions, emotions, sentiments and other private states.

• Related Work: – Sentiments (Turney & Littman 2003; Dave, Lawrence, &

Pennock 2003; Pang & Lee 2004)

– Product Reputation Tracking (Morinaga et al. 2002; Yi et al. 2003)

– Opinion Oriented Summarization and QA (Hu & Liu 2004; Yu & Hatzivassiloglou 2003)

• Opinion - personal beliefs

• Emotion - state of mind

• Sentiments - positive/negative judgements

Motivation

• Our observation: many false hits produced by Information Extraction (IE) systems come from subjective sentences.

• Hypothesis: we can improve IE performance by avoiding extractions from subjective sentences.

Examples

“D’Aubruisson unleashed harsh attacks on Duarte…”

“The Parliament exploded into fury against the government when word leaked out…”

“The subversives must suspend the aggression against the people and the destruction of the economy…”

The Big Picture

SubjectiveSentenceClassifier

subjectivesentences

objectivesentences

FullInformationExtraction

SelectiveInformationExtraction

The Subjectivity Classifier

• Most documents contain a mix of subjective and objective sentences– 44% of sentences in newspaper articles subjective!

(Wiebe et al. 2004)

• We used the Naïve Bayes subjective sentence classifier developed by Wiebe & Riloff [2005].

– Classifies at sentence level– unsupervised

– rivals best supervised methods

Initial Training Data Creation

rule-based subjectivesentenceclassifier

rule-basedobjectivesentenceclassifier

subjective & objective sentences

unlabeled texts

subjective clues

Naïve Bayestraining

POSfeatures

subjectiveclues

Naïve Bayes Training

extractionpattern learner

training set

objectivepatterns

subjectivepatterns

Naïve BayesClassifier

NB Confidence Measure

CM =

MUC-4 IE Task

• To extract information about terrorist events in Latin America.

• Evaluated performance on 4 types of information:– perpetrators (individuals), victims, targets, weapons

• Corpus: 1700 texts– 1400 used for training, 100 for tuning, 200 for testing

• Used Autoslog-TS to generate extraction patterns– system used 397 patterns

Base IE System Performance

System Rec Prec F #Correct #Wrong

IE .52 .42 .47 266 367

Filtering Subjective Sentences

System Rec Prec F #Correct #Wrong

IE .52 .42 .47 266 367IE+SubjFilter .44 .44 .44 218 (-48) 273 (-94)

Source Attribution Sentences

• In news articles, factual information is often prefaced with a source attribution. Examples:

“The Associated Press reported…” “The President stated…”

• Source attribution sentences often contain important facts even if subjective language is also present.

Source Attribution Modification

• Keep the subjective sentences if they contain a source attribution.

1) the sentence contains a communication verb:

{affirm, announce, cite, confirm, convey, disclose, report,

tell, say, state }

2) the subjectivity classifier considers the sentence to be only

weakly subjective (CM 25)

Results with Source Attribution Modification

System Rec. Prec. F #Correct #Wrong

IE .52 .42 .47 266 367

IE+SubjFilter .44 .44 .44 218(-48) 273(-94)

IE+SubjFilter2 .46 .44 .45 231(-35) 289(-78)

Selective Filtering

• We observed that subjective sentence can contain important facts. For example:

“He was

outraged by the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.”

• Modification: selectively extract information from subjective sentences

• Done using Indicator Patterns.

Indicator Patterns

• We defined an indicator pattern as a pattern that has the following Autoslog-TS statistics :

P(relevant | pattern) 0.65 and Frequency 10

• Indicator Patterns clearly represent a fact of interest– “murder of X” – “X was assassinated”

.

Results for Selective Subjectivity Filtering

System Rec Prec F #Correct #Wrong

IE .52 .42 .47 266 367

IE+SubjFilter .44 .44 .44 218 (-48) 273 (-94)

IE+SubjFilter2 .46 .44 .45 231 (-35) 289 (-78)

IE+SF2+Slct .51 .45 .48 258 (-8) 311 (-56)

Removing Subjective Extraction Patterns

• Example:

“….to destroy the building.”

“…to destroy the process of reconciliation.”

• Use subjectivity analysis to remove subjective patterns.

• We classified a pattern as subjective if:1)

P(subjective | pattern) > .50 and

2) frequency 10

Final Results

System Rec Prec F #Correct #Wrong

IE .52 .42 .47 266 367

IE+SubjFilter .44 .44 .44 218 (-48) 273 (-94)

IE+SubjFilter2 .46 .44 .45 231 (-35) 289 (-78)

IE+SF2+Slct .51 .45 .48 258 (-8) 311 (-56)

IE+SF2+Slct

-SubjEPs .51 .46 .48 258(-8) 305(-62)

Subjectivity Filtering Combined with Topic Classification

System Rec Prec

IE .52 .42IE w/Perfect TC .52 .53IE w/Perfect TC + SubjFilter .51 .56

Conclusions

• Subjectivity filtering strategies improved IE precision with minimal recall loss.

• The benefits of subjectivity classification are synergistic with those of topic classification.

• As subjectivity classification improves, we expect corresponding improvements to IE.

IE Evaluation

Performed at extraction level, before template generation

Standard IE System

texts extracts

Slot Extraction

Component

Template Generation Component

• We defined an indicator pattern as a pattern that has the following Autoslog-TS statistics :

P(relevant | pattern) 0.65 and Frequency 10

• Using only the indicator patterns for IE not sufficient.

Rec Prec FIE .52 .42 .47IE (Indicators Only) .40 .54 .46

IE System

• We used Autoslog-TS to generate extraction patterns.– 40,553 distinct patterns were learned

• We manually reviewed top patterns (2808 patterns)

• The final system used 397 patterns.

Examples of Filtered Extractions

• The demonstrators, convoked by the solidarity with Latin America Committee, verbally attacked Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani and have asked the Spanish government to offer itself as a mediator to promote and end to the armed conflict.

PATTERN: attacked <dobj>VICTIM: “Salvadoran President

Alfredo Cristiani”

Examples of Filtered Extractions

• The crime was directed at hindering the development of the electoral process and destroying the reconciliation process…

PATTERN: destroying <dobj>

TARGET: “the reconciliation process”

• Presidents, political and social figures of the continent have said that the solution is not based on the destruction of a native plant but in active fight against drug consumption.

PATTERN: destruction of <np>

TARGET: “a native plant”

Breakdown by Extraction Type

Category Baseline SubjFilter Rec Prec Rec Prec

Perp .47 .33 .45 .38

Victim .51 .50 .50 .52

Target .63 .42 .62 .47

Weapon .45 .39 .43 .42

Total .52 .42 .51 .46

Subjective Patterns

attacks on <np> to attack <dobj>

communique by <np> to destroy <dobj>

<subj> was linked leaders of <np>

<subj> unleashed was aimed at <np>

offensive against <np> dialogue with <np>

The following extraction patterns were classified as subjective:

Metaphor

• False hits can come from subjective sentences that contain metaphorical language.

The Parliament exploded into fury against the government when word leaked out…