Connotation Frames: Typed Relations of Implied Sentiment in Predicate-Argument Structure

Through a choice of a predicate (e.g., "violate"), a writer can convey subtle sentiments and value judgements toward the arguments of a verb (e.g., projecting the agent as an "antagonist" and the theme as a "victim"). We introduce connotation frames to encode the rich dimensions of implied sentiment, value judgements, and effect evaluation as typed relations that these choices influence, and propose a factor graph formulation that captures the inter-play among different types of connotative relations at the lexicon-level. Experimental results confirm that our model is effective in predicting connotative sentiments compared to strong baselines and existing sentiment lexicons.