Exploiting syntactic and semantic relationships between terms for opinion retrieval

Opinion retrieval is the task of finding documents that express an opinion about a given query. A key challenge in opinion retrieval is to capture the query-related opinion score of a document. Existing methods rely mainly on the proximity information between the opinion terms and the query terms to address the key challenge. In this study, we propose to incorporate the syntactic and semantic information of terms into a probabilistic model to capture the query-related opinion score more accurately. The syntactic tree structure of a sentence is used to evaluate the modifying probability between an opinion term and a noun within the sentence with a tree kernel method. Moreover, WordNet and the probabilistic topic model are used to evaluate the semantic relatedness between any noun and the given query. The experimental results over standard TREC baselines on the benchmark BLOG06 collection demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, in comparison with the proximity-based method and other baselines.