Opizer

Opinion summarization, also known as sentiment summarization, is the task of automatically generating summaries for a set of opinions about a specific entity (Conrad et al., 2009).

One of the main approaches to generate opinion summaries is aspect-based opinion summarization. Aspect-based opinion summarization generates summaries of opinions for the main aspects of an entity. Entities could be products, services, organizations or others, and aspects are attributes or components of them. In the last years, this task has gained much importance because of the large amount of online information available on the web and the increasing interest in learning the user evaluation about products, companies, people and others. Unfortunately, for Brazilian Portuguese language, there are few researches in that area.

In this scenario, this masters project investigated the development of some aspect-based opinion summarization methods. In particular, it was implemented four classical methods of the literature, extractive and abstractive ones. These methods were analyzed in each of its phases and, as a result of this analysis, it was produced two proposals to generate summaries of opinions. Both proposals attempt to use the main advantages of the classical methods to generate better summaries. In order to analyze the performance of the implemented methods, experiments were carried out according to three traditional evaluation measures: informativeness, linguistic quality and usefulness of the summary. The results show that the proposed methods in this work are competitive with the classical methods and, in many cases, they got the best performance.

Conrad, J. G.; Leidner, J. L.; Schilder, F.; Kondadadi, R. (2009). Query-based opinion summarization for legal blog entries. In ICAIL, pp. 167-176. ACM.