A Review Corpus for Argumentation Analysis

The analysis of user reviews has become critical in research and industry, as user reviews increasingly impact the reputation of products and services. Many review texts comprise an involved argumentation with facts and opinions on different product features or aspects. Therefore, classifying sentiment polarity does not suffice to capture a review’s impact. We claim that an argumentation analysis is needed, including opinion summarization, sentiment score prediction, and others. Since existing language resources to drive such research are missing, we have designed the ArguAna TripAdvisor corpus, which compiles 2,100 manually annotated hotel reviews balanced with respect to the reviews’ sentiment scores. Each review text is segmented into facts, positive, and negative opinions, while all hotel aspects and amenities are marked. In this paper, we present the design and a first study of the corpus. We reveal patterns of local sentiment that correlate with sentiment scores, thereby defining a promising starting point for an effective argumentation analysis.