Language Use: What can it tell us?

Marjorie Freedman,  Alex Baron,  Vasin Punyakanok,  Ralph Weischedel
Raytheon BBN Technologies


Abstract

For 20 years, information extraction has focused on facts expressed in text. In contrast, this paper is a snapshot of research in progress on inferring properties and relationships among participants in dialogs, even though these properties/relationships need not be ex-pressed as facts. For instance, can a machine detect that someone is attempting to persuade another to action or to change beliefs or is asserting their credibility? We report results on both English and Arabic discussion forums.




Full paper: http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P/P11/P11-2059.pdf