Analyzing Appraisal Automatically

We present a method for classifying texts automatically, based on their subjective content. We apply a standard method for calculating semantic orientation, and expand it by giving more prominence to certain parts of the text, where we believe most subjective content is concentrated. We also apply a linguistic classification of Appraisal and find that it could be helpful in distinguishing different types of subjective texts (e.g., movie reviews from consumer product reviews).