Appraisal of opinion expressions in discourse
Résumé
Introduction: Opinions are the common stock of conversation; and yet, like many facets of every day life, they are difficult to analyze precisely. Roughly, research in sentiment analysis comes in two flavors: a psychological one and a computational one. Psychologists propose cognitive theories of emotions and affect of various sorts. We distinguish three main approaches: the discrete approach where emotions are a small set of basic, innate and universal concepts (P. Ekman 1970) (C. Izard 1971), the dimensional approach which proposes dimensions underlying emotional concepts (Osgood et al. 1957) (J. Russell 1983) and finally, the appraisal approach where emotions are defined as the evaluation of the interaction between someone’s goals, beliefs, etc., and his environment (A. Ortony et al. 1988) (J. Martin and P. White 2005).