Multilingual Opinion Analysis

There is growing interest in the automatic extraction of opinions, emotions, and sentiments in text, to provide tools and support for various natural language processing applications. Most of the research to date has focused on English, which is mainly explained by the availability of resources for opinion analysis, such as lexicons and manually labeled corpora. In this talk, I will describe methods to automatically generate resources for opinion analysis for a new target language by leveraging on the resources and tools available for English, which in many cases took years of work to complete. Specifically, I will try to provide answers to the following questions. First, can we
derive an opinion lexicon for a new language using an existing English lexicon and a bilingual dictionary? Second, can we derive opinion-annotated corpora in a new language using existing opinion analysis tools for English and parallel corpora? Third, can we build tools for opinion analysis for a new target language by relying on these automatically generated resources? Finally, can we use a multilingual representation to leverage information from multiple languages, and build opinion classifiers that improve over the use of only one language at a time.

This is joint work with Carmen Banea and Janyce Wiebe.
Rada Mihalcea is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at the University of Michigan. Her research interests are in computational linguistics, with a focus on lexical semantics, graph-based algorithms for natural language processing, and multilingual natural language processing. She serves or has served on the editorial boards of the Journals of Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluations, Natural Language Engineering, Research in Language in Computation, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, and Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. She was a program co-chair for the Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2011), and the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (2009). She is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award (2008) and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2009). In 2013, she was made an honorary citizen of her hometown of Cluj-Napoca, Romania.