REPRESENTING AND RECOGNIZING POINT OF VIEW

The proposed actor-role representation of ideological point of view accords with some recent work by Lakoff (1991), generalizes and improves upon previous AI work on representation of ideology.

Abstract

A representation of ideological point of view is articulated and a method for detecting the point(s) of view expressed in a news story is described. A version of the method, actor-role analysis, is encoded in a computer program, SpinDoetor, which can automatically detect the point(s) of view represented in some news stories. SpinDoctor is a computer program designed to detect ideological point of viewlin news stories. To detect point of view, SpinDoctor implements a critical reading strategy called actor-role analysis (Sack, 1994a; Sack, 1994b). Actor-role analysis was developed around the following observation: one means of detecting point of view is to examine how certain people, who appear again and again in the news (i.e., news actors), are described or portrayed (i.e., are assigned roles). Thus, for example, if one is given a news story which mentions Oliver North -- (in)famous for his role in the Iran-Contra affair and recent senatorial campaign -- and the story assigns North the role of patriot (via the use of certain adjectives and verbs), one can quite certain that the point of view expressed in the story is significantly to the right (in the spectrum of US politics) than that expressed by another news story which assigns North the role of villain or criminal. Two aspects of actor-role analysis, as it is implemented in the SpinDoctor system, might be of especial interest to researchers concerned with textual analysis: (1) A representation for ideological point of view: Although practically all, contemporary, AI systems for NLP are capable of finding actors and roles in texts to fill in scripts, frames, or templates (e.g., Jacobs and Ran, 1993), none of these systems assign any political significance to the pairing of certain actors with certain roles (e.g., North as patriot versus North as criminal). contrast, I maintain that sets of actor-role pairs are an interesting and implementable representation for differing ideological points of view. The proposed actor-role representation of ideological point of view accords with some recent work by Lakoff (1991) and generalizes and improves upon previous AI work on representation of ideology (e.g., Abelson and Carroll, 1966; Carbonell, 1978). (2) An algorithm for anaphoric resolution: Actor-role analysis incorporates a new anaphoric resolution algorithm. It is shown how careful attention to actor-role pairings assists in the resolution of anaphoric reference. By noting, for example, that an instance of the pronoun he is cast in the role of victim and that, earlier in the same story, Lieut. Rodriguez is also cast in the role of