Opinion Annotation in GATE

  • Introduction

    The instructions below apply to the current style of opinion annotation performed by the Subjectivity Analysis group at the University of Pittsburgh. For a discussion of the annotation scheme please read the LRE 2005 paper on annotating subjectivity, and the ACL 2005 paper (bibtex) for the extension with attitude annotations. The tool that we use for annotation is GATE, which is freely available from Sheffield University. See http://gate.ac.uk/ for more information about GATE. These instructions are current as of GATE 6.0.

  • Getting Started

    GATE screenshot

  • How to Annotate in GATE

    In GATE, load the document: sample-documents/examples-untagged.xml

    While it's possible to load a plain text file or a web document URL and to just begin annotating, some minimal preprocessing can make the annotation process a bit easier (see XXXX for how we preprocess a document in GATE).

  • MPQA Annotation Scheme

  • MPQA Annotation Practice

    This practice will walk you through a variety of different cases (implicit direct-subjective and objective-speech annotations, implicit sources, etc.) and show how they are annotated in GATE.

    Open again the document sample-documents/examples-untagged.xml in GATE. There are three sections in this document (HR10, HR16, and PNG1), each taken from a different news article. Each link below will take you to explicit instructions for annotating a given section.

    There are three additional practice documents in the sample-documents directory:

    • 09.53.15-23595.unannotated.xml
    • 11.21.37-22256.unannotated.xml
    • 21.37.46-9337.unannotated.xml

    Annotated versions of these documents are also provided which you can use to check your practice annotations.


    This work was (in part) supported by The Northeast Regional Research Center (NRRC), which is sponsored by the Advanced Research and Development Activity in Information Technology (ARDA), a U.S. Government entity, which sponsors and promotes research of import to the Intelligence Community, which includes but is not limited to the CIA, DIA, NSA, NIMA, and NRO.

  • goodFor/badFor Annotation Scheme

    We give a brief introduction to the goodFor/badFor annotation shceme. For more details, please refer to the annotation manual. A goodFor/badFor corpus based on this annotation scheme was used in:

    Lingjia Deng, Yoonjoung Choi and Janyce Wiebe (2013). Benefactive/Malefactive Event and Writer Attitude Annotation In the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL-2013, short paper).

    The corpus based on goodFor/badFor annotation scheme could be downloaded here.

  • goodFor/badFor Annotation Practice

    This practice provides you with several exmaples used to emphasize the principle annotation insturctions. For more detailed examples, please refer to our manual.



annotation instructions by J. Ruppenhofer