Towards discourse annotation and sentiment analysis of the Basque Opinion Corpus

Abstract

Discourse information is crucial for a better understanding of the text structure and it is also necessary to describe which part of an opinionated text is more relevant or to de- cide how a text span can change the polar- ity (strengthen or weaken) of other span by means of coherence relations. This work presents the first results on the annotation of the Basque Opinion Corpus using Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Our evaluation re- sults and analysis show us the main avenues to improve on a future annotation process. We have also extracted the subjectivity of several rhetorical relations and the results show the ef- fect of sentiment words in relations and the in- fluence of each relation in the semantic orien- tation value.