2.1. Appraisal Theory
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UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID FACULTAD DE FILOLOGÍA DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOLOGÍA INGLESA TESIS DOCTORAL Annotating Appraisal in English and Spanish product reviews from mobile application stores: a contrastive study for linguistic and computational purposes La anotación de la Valoración en críticas de productos extraídas de tiendas de aplicaciones para móvil en inglés y en español: un estudio contrastivo para fines lingüísticos y computacionales MEMORIA PARA OPTAR AL GRADO DE DOCTORA PRESENTADA POR Natalia Mora López DIRECTORA Julia Lavid López Madrid, 2018 © Natalia Mora López, 2017 UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID FACULTAD DE FILOLOGÍA Departamento de Filología Inglesa I (Lengua y Lingüística Inglesa) TESIS DOCTORAL Annotating Appraisal in English and Spanish product reviews from mobile application stores: a contrastive study for linguistic and computational purposes La anotación de la Valoración en críticas de productos extraídas de tiendas de aplicaciones para móvil en inglés y en español: un estudio contrastivo para fines lingüísticos y computacionales MEMORIA PARA OPTAR AL GRADO DE DOCTOR PRESENTADA POR Natalia Mora López Directora Julia Lavid López Madrid, 2017 Annotating Appraisal in English and Spanish Product Reviews from Mobile Application Stores: a Contrastive Study for Linguistic and Computational Purposes DOCTORAL THESIS Natalia Mora López Departamento de Filología Inglesa Facultad de Filología Universidad Complutense de Madrid Madrid, 2017 La anotación de la Valoración en críticas de productos extraídas de tiendas de aplicaciones para móvil en inglés y en español: un estudio contrastivo para fines lingüísticos y computacionales Memoria que se presenta para optar al título de Doctor Natalia Mora López Dirigida por Prof. Dra. Dña. Julia Lavid López Departamento de Filología Inglesa Facultad de Filología Universidad Complutense de Madrid Madrid, 2017 To my parents and brother, who always try to make what is long, short, and what is tough, easy. Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the effort, insight and exceptional responsiveness of my thesis supervisor, Prof. Dra. Julia Lavid, whose guidance and help has been key in this thesis from the very first day to the very last minute. She always encouraged me not to give up, and her substantial input and thorough revisions made it all possible. También quiero agradecer a mi familia todo el apoyo y ayuda que me han prestado siempre en todo lo que he hecho, incluido este trabajo, de cualquier forma en que han podido. Gracias. Abstract Evaluation, opinion and subjectivity are related phenomena which are currently receiving attention both in the linguistic and the computational communities. One of the most influential theories that deal with the phenomenon of evaluation and subjectivity is the ‘Appraisal’ framework, which proposes that linguistic expressions of evaluative meanings such as emotion, attitude and opinion can be divided into three different axes: Attitude, Engagement and Graduation. To date, there is no large-scale cross-linguistic work in the computational or in the linguistic communities which has set out the task to validate the different features of Appraisal Theory empirically through corpus annotation, and to investigate its application to a relatively new genre, namely, mobile application reviews The work developed in this dissertation is an attempt at validating aspects of Appraisal Theory in a contrastive manner (i.e. comparing English and Spanish), and at providing a cross-linguistic characterisation of this new review genre in terms of Appraisal features. The categories, empirically validated with a high degree of inter-annotator agreement, are used to annotate a larger bilingual corpus. The results showed interesting language- specific differences, such as a higher degree of straightforward strategies in the Spanish texts in opposition to a higher modulation of meanings in the English ones. In addition, some tendencies may be pointed out among different products (applications and games, vs. books and films) as well as specific aspects that are typically included in negative reviews (Pseudo-Questions and Judgement) or in positive reviews (Capacity). CONTENTS Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................................................. V ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................... VII LIST OF FIGURES...................................................................................................................... XI LIST OF TABLES ..................................................................................................................... XIII CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................... 1 1.1. Background ................................................................................................................. 1 1.2. Aims and research questions ........................................................................................ 6 1.3. Methodology................................................................................................................ 7 1.4. Thesis organization ...................................................................................................... 8 CHAPTER 2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK .................................................................................. 9 2.1. Appraisal Theory ....................................................................................................... 9 2.1.1. Attitude .............................................................................................................. 11 2.1.2. Engagement ....................................................................................................... 16 2.1.3. Graduation ......................................................................................................... 21 2.1.4. Previous and related research on Appraisal ......................................................... 24 2.2. The genre of ‘Mobile application reviews’ .............................................................. 26 2.2.1. Characteristics of reviews in application stores as a genre ................................... 29 2.2.2. Previous research on reviews published in application stores .............................. 35 CHAPTER 3 VALIDATING APPRAISAL FEATURES THROUGH CORPUS ANNOTATION ................ 39 3.1. Introduction ............................................................................................................. 39 3.2. The ‘training corpus’ ............................................................................................... 40 3.3. Appraisal categories selected for annotation ........................................................... 42 3.3.1. Attitude .............................................................................................................. 44 3.3.2. Engagement ....................................................................................................... 45 3.3.3. Graduation ......................................................................................................... 46 3.4. Annotation scheme and guidelines .......................................................................... 47 3.5. Annotation experiments ........................................................................................... 49 3.5.1. Agreement study 1 ............................................................................................. 49 3.5.2. Agreement study 2 ............................................................................................. 51 3.5.3. Agreement study 3 ............................................................................................. 52 ix CONTENTS 3.6. Evaluating the annotations ...................................................................................... 52 3.6.1. Annotation results for agreement study 1 ............................................................ 53 3.6.2. Annotation results for agreement study 2 ............................................................ 57 3.6.3. Annotation results for agreement study 3 ............................................................ 63 3.7. Summary and discussion.......................................................................................... 67 CHAPTER 4 ANNOTATION OF THE LARGER CORPUS ................................................................ 69 4.1. Introduction ............................................................................................................. 69 4.2. The larger corpus ..................................................................................................... 70 4.3. Annotation results: general tendencies .................................................................... 75 4.4. Language-specific differences (English vs. Spanish) ............................................... 77 4.4.1. Attitude .............................................................................................................. 79 4.4.2. Engagement........................................................................................................ 83 4.4.3. Graduation ......................................................................................................... 88 4.5. Item differences (applications vs. games vs. books vs. films vs. music) .................. 91 4.5.1. Attitude