Polling the Blogosphere: A Rule-Based Approach to Belief Classification

The research described here is part of a larger project with the objective of determining if a writer believes a proposition to be true or false. This task requires a deep understanding of a proposition's semantic context, which is far beyond NLP's state of the art. In light of this difficulty, this paper presents a shallow semantic framework that addresses the sub-problem of finding a proposition's truth-value at the sentence level. The framework consists of several classes of linguistic elements that, when linked to a proposition through specific lexico-syntactic connectors, change its truth-value. A pilot evaluation of a system implementing this framework yields promising results.