An opinion about opinions about opinions: subjectivity and the aggregate reader

Asad Sayeed

This opinion piece proposes that recent advances in opinion detection are limited in the extent to which they can detect important categories of opinion because they are not designed to capture some of the pragmatic aspects of opinion. A component of these is the perspective of the user of an opinion-mining system as to what an opinion really is, which is in itself a matter of opinion (metasubjectivity). We propose a way to define this component of opinion and describe the challenges it poses for corpus development and sentence-level detection technologies. Finally, we suggest that investment in techniques to handle metasubjectivity will likely bear costs but bring benefits in the longer term.