Joint Inference for Fine-grained Opinion Extraction

This paper addresses the task of finegrained opinion extraction – the identification of opinion-related entities: the opinion expressions, the opinion holders, and the targets of the opinions, and the relations between opinion expressions and their targets and holders. Most existing approaches tackle the extraction of opinion entities and opinion relations in a pipelined manner, where the interdependencies among different extraction stages are not captured. We propose a joint inference model that leverages knowledge from predictors that optimize subtasks of opinion extraction, and seeks a globally optimal solution. Experimental results demonstrate that our joint inference approach significantly outperforms traditional pipeline methods and baselines that tackle subtasks in isolation for the problem of opinion extraction.