Recognizing subjectivity: a case study in manual tagging

A case study of a sentence-level categorization in which tagging instructions are developed and used by four judges to classify clauses from the Wall Street Journal as either subjective or objective.

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a case study of a sentence-level categorization in which tagging instructions are developed and used by four judges to classify clauses from the Wall Street Journal as either subjective or objective . Agreement among the four judges is analyzed, and based on that analysis, each clause is given a final classification. To provide empirical support for the classifications, correlations are assessed in the data between the subjective category and a basic semantic class posited by Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik (1985).