查看文章

Online discussion forums (Figure 1) typically manifest into tree-like structures that are reminiscent of argument trees. Whilst these discussion forums contain a wealth of information related to people’s opinions they also include implicit argumentation information. However unlike argument trees any relationship between posts in a discussion tree remains implicit. In recent years there has been considerable interest in harnessing opinionated knowledge that is buried in discussion forums in a variety of domains (eg retail, health and politics). However to-date the main focus of opinion mining has been on generating and applying sentiment lexicons or developing supervised learning algorithms that pay little to no regard to the underlying role of implicit information contained in the conversation between users.