This thesis describes a machine learning system for understanding appraisal in design documents. In linguistics, analysis of attitudes expressed in text is known as appraisal, which is the writer's subjective attitude (i.e., the opinion, sentiment or attitude expressed) toward the semantic meaning. Semantic orientation is the aspect of appraisal that expresses the positive or negative stance of...

We assume that actors of the professionalization process of palliative care make a special effort to demarcate it from euthanasia, and that such an effort has a significant impact on beliefs and attitudes toward euthanasia among the whole medical profession. We investigated concurrently attitudes toward palliative care, conceptions of euthanasia and opinion toward its legalization among a sampl...

While propositional doxastic attitudes, like knowledge and belief, capture an agent’s opinion about certain propositions, her attitudes towards sources of information express her opinion about the reliability (or trustworthiness) of those sources. If an agent trusts a witness, then she will, within certain limits, tend to accept his testimony as veridical. But if she considers the witness to be...

Health care workers especially medical students are at risk of acquiring infection through occupational exposure. Few studies have reported on medical students’ knowledge of standard precautions and sharp injuries and noted lack of adequate knowledge of standard precautions. To identify deficiencies which could be addressed by education and training, it is useful to measure KAP of medical stude...

Opinion mining has been receiving increasing attention recently, and various approaches have been suggested for mining sentiment information, such as mining attitudes or opinions about a topic or product etc. However, as far as we know, little work has been reported on citation opinion mining (COM). By COM, we refer to the process of identifying authors opinions towards the works they cite, suc...

to investigate attitudes of iranian senior dental students towards preventive dentistry in relation to their background factors and self-perceived competency in providing preventive care.in spring 2008, a questionnaire survey was conducted with all the senior dental students of seven randomly selected state dental schools in iran. in addition to the respondents' age and gender, the voluntary qu...

Effects of anti-tobacco and anti-marijuana TV advertisements on explicit (i.e., semantic differential ratings) and implicit (i.e. Implicit Association Test, IAT) attitudes toward tobacco and marijuana were compared. Two hundred twenty nine, 18- to 19-year-old U.S. college students were randomly assigned to anti-tobacco or anti-marijuana PSA viewing conditions. Participants completed a short sur...

Implicit attitudes are mental states that appear sometimes to cause agents to act in ways that conflict with their considered beliefs. Implicit attitudes are usually held to be mere associations between representations. Recently, however, some philosophers have suggested that they are, or are very like, ordinary beliefs: they are apt to feature in properly inferential processing. This claim is ...