Opinion search in web logs

Web logs (blogs) are a fast growing forum for people of all ages to express their feelings and opinions on topics of interest. The entries are often written in informal language without the structure found in newswire or published articles. One blog entry may contain many topics, these topics may express an opinion or a fact on a particular topic. This research is in contrast to work on opinion detection which has been carried out on more formally authored texts and on segments that are either whole documents or sentences. Whole web logs are divided into topics using a simple text segmentation approach. Similarity scores are used to distinguish where topic changes occur. The results are compared to human-evaluated topic changes and the most accurate algorithm is used in the remainder of the research.Words within each topicblock are allocated weightings depending on their opinion-bearing strength. Two approaches of using these weights, the sum and the maximum, are used to determine whether the topic-block is opinion-bearing or non-opinion-bearing. The opinionbearing topic-blocks are rated by human evaluators as either opinion-bearing or non-opinionbearing with precision of 67% for approach A and 70% for approach B. These results are compared with two approaches on published text to identify the difference between web logs and published articles. © 2007, Australian Computer Society, Inc.