The role of Rhetorical Structure Theory in Polarity Analysis

The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by David E. Losada

DATE: Tuesday, June 16th 2015
PLACE: USI Lugano Campus, room SI-013, Informatics building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 13.30

ABSTRACT:
In this talk, I´ll discuss the usefulness of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) for polarity estimation in blogs.
Polarity estimation in large-scale and multi-topic domains is a difficult issue. Most solutions essentially rely on frequencies of sentiment-carrying words (e.g., taken from a lexicon) when analysing the sentiment conveyed by natural language text. These approaches ignore the structural aspects of a document, which contain valuable Information. RST provides important information about the relative importance of the different text spans in a document. This knowledge could be useful for sentiment analysis and polarity classification.

BIO:
Dr. David E. Losada is an Associate Professor in Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence in the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain). He is currently the Director of the Master's Programme on Big Data Analytics. David E. Losada received his BS in Computer Science (with honors) in 1997, and his PhD in Computer Science (with honors) in 2001, both from the University of A Coruña (Spain). His current research interests include a wide range of Information Retrieval (IR) and related areas such as: IR probabilistic models, summarization, novelty detection, sentence retrieval, patent search and opinion mining. Losada is an active member of the IR community and he regularly serves in the Programme Committee of prestigious international conferences such as SIGIR or ECIR. He has also led several R&D projects and contracts in the area of search technologies. In 2011, Losada was recognised with an ACM senior member award.

HOST: Prof. Fabio Crestani