Lexical Acquisition for Opinion Inference: A Sense-Level Lexicon of Benefactive and Malefactive Events

Opinion inference arises when opinions are expressed toward states and events which positive or negatively affect entities, i.e., benefactive and malefactive events. This paper addresses creating a lexicon of such events, which would be helpful to infer opinions. Verbs may be ambiguous, in that some meanings may be benefactive and others may be malefactive or neither. Thus, we use WordNet to create a sense-level lexicon. We begin with seed senses culled from FrameNet and expand the lexicon using WordNet relationships. The evaluations show that the accuracy of the approach is well above baseline accuracy.