Annotating Attributions and Private States

Proceedings of the Workshop on Frontiers in Corpus Annotation II: Pie in the Sky, pages 53–60, Ann Arbor, June 2005. c⃝2005 Association for Computational Linguistics Annotating Attributions and Private States Theresa Wilson Intelligent Systems Program University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA 15260 twilson@cs.pitt.edu Janyce Wiebe Department of Computer Science University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA 15260 wiebe@cs.pitt.edu Abstract This paper describes extensions to a corpus annotation scheme for the manual annotation of attributions, as well as opinions, emotions, sentiments, speculations, evaluations and other private states in language. It discusses the scheme with respect to the “Pie in the Sky” Check List of Desirable Semantic Information for Annotation. We believe that the scheme is a good foundation for adding private state anno- tations to other layers of semantic meaning. 1 Introduction This paper describes a fine-grained annotation scheme for key components and properties of opinions, emo- tions, sentiments, speculations, evaluations, and other private states in text. We first give an overview of the core scheme. We then describe recent extensions to the scheme, namely refined annotations of attitudes and tar- gets, or objects, of private states. Finally, we discuss re- lated items from the “Pie in the Sky” Check List of De- sirable Semantic Information for Annotation, and related work. We believe our scheme would provide a founda- tion for adding private state annotations to other layers of semantic and pragmatic meaning. 2 The Core Scheme This section overviews the core of the annotation scheme. Further details may be found in (Wilson and Wiebe, 2003; Wiebe et al., 2005). 2.1 Means of Expressing Private States The goals of the annotation scheme are to represent inter- nal mental and emotional states, and to distinguish sub- jective information from material presented as fact. As a result, the annotation scheme is centered on the no- tion of private state, a general term that covers opinions, beliefs, thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals, evaluations, and judgments. As Quirk et al. (1985) define it, a private state is a state that is not open to objective observation or verification: “a person may be observed to assert that God exists, but not to believe that God exists. Belief is in this sense ‘private’.” (p. 1181) Following literary theo- rists such as Banfield (1982), we use the term subjectivity for linguistic expressions of private states in the contexts of texts and conversations. We can further view private states in terms of their functional components — as states of experiencers hold- ing attitudes, optionally toward targets. For example, for the private state in the sentence John hates Mary, the ex- periencer is “John,” the attitude is “hate,” and the target is “Mary.” We create private state frames for three main types of private state expressions in text: • explicit mentions of private states • speech events expressing private states • expressive subjective elements An example of an explicit mention of a private state is “fears” in (1): (1) “The U.S. fears a spill-over,” said Xirao- Nima. An example of a speech event expressing …

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