Summarizing Event Opinions for News Reports

Opinions on the news reports are very useful for people to understand an event, while the vast availability of such opinions becomes overwhelming to people when there is too much to digest. In this paper, we present an approach on summarizing event opinions for news reports. Firstly, we search relevant reports by submitting event-describing keywords, and for each report, we extract main textual content and separate subjective opinions from objective facts. Secondly, we propose a subjectivity detection approach to identify the opinion sentences. Thirdly, in order to summarize opinions, we propose a digest approach to list and compare standpoints by classifying opinions into positive/negative camps according to their sentiment polarities. In each camp, besides salient opinions, we also identify and present opinion holders (e.g. people, organizations, and countries), which contribute to a better understanding of their stances and relations. Lastly, we develop a system to display the opinion summarization of the event that is searched. An evaluation on effectiveness shows that it is favored by users.