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Exploring The Characteristics Of Opinion Expressions For Political Opinion Classification, Bei Yu, Stefan Kaufmann, Daniel Diermeier

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Recently there has been increasing interest in constructing general-purpose political opinion classifiers for applications in e-Rulemaking. This problem is generally modeled as a sentiment classification task in a new domain. However, the classification accuracy is not as good as that in other domains such as customer reviews. In this paper, we report the results of a series of experiments designed to explore the characteristics of political opinion expression which might affect the sentiment classification performance. We found that the average sentiment level of Congressional debate is higher than that of neutral news articles, but lower than that of movie reviews. …