Advanced Topics in Natural Language Processing: Subjectivity
and Sentiment Analysis
CS 3730, ISSP 3120
Syllabus
Days/Times: Mondays and Wednesdays, 10:00 to 11:15 a.m.(*see footnote below)
Location: Sennott Square Building, Rm 5313
Instructor:
Jan Wiebe
wiebe@cs.pitt.edu
Sennott Square Building, Rm. 5409
(412) 624 9590
Office hours: by appointment (send me email). I’m happy to meet with everyone
often, about presentations, wiki postings, etc.
Description: This is a graduate NLP seminar on a burgeoning field which goes by
several different names, reflecting varying goals and conceptual models, such as:
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Sentiment Analysis
Opinion Mining
Opinion Extraction
Subjectivity Analysis
Appraisal Analysis
Affect Sensing
Identifying Perspective
Etc.
The area covers quite a large problem space. The topic areas in the course will range
from linguistic models; through developing lexical resources and automatic opinion
extraction, mining, and classification systems; to exploiting subjectivity and sentiment
analysis in end applications (review mining, opinion summarization, predicting election
outcomes,…)
The workload will be steady and distributed throughout the course.
Prerequisites: graduate-level courses in AI and NLP, or permission of instructor. If
you don't have these prerequisites but are interested in the course, please send me email.
Course Readings: A bibliography of papers and a schedule listing papers you can
chose from each week will be available. There will be some weeks with fixed readings.
For most of the course, each student is responsible for one paper per week, and, for the
most part, students will all read different papers. Students can add relevant papers to the
bibliography, if they wish (please send me email).
Presentations, Discussions, and Summaries:
We won’t focus on each student doing massive amounts of reading, but rather on
distributing individual knowledge and opinions among the group through presentations,
wiki discussions, and class discussions. This will give you practice with skills that are
invaluable in carrying out research.
Some weeks will consist of formal lectures and in-class exercises. The last week will
consist of short presentations of white papers. Most weeks, the course will work as
follows (this is probably different from what people are used to, so please read through to
the end of this section to understand the process). Each week (Wednesday & Monday),
two students are presenters. On Wednesday, each presenter will present the paper they
read. Before class Wednesday, the non-presenters will each read their own paper (not
the ones that will be presented) and post on the class wiki two things: an objective
overview of their paper and a reaction essay for their paper (the following was in the
original syllabus, but it became apparent that the essays should be longer than 800 words.
these are brief, together at most 800 words). Between Wednesday and 5pm Friday, there
will be wiki discussions of the papers for that week. On Monday, the presenters will
present summaries of the wiki contributions. One presenter will summarize the
overviews of all the papers read that week, and the other will summarize the reaction
essays for them. Then, the two presenters will lead class discussions of the papers,
reaction essays, and wiki discussions.
One interesting aspect of the class is that, for the Monday summary presentations, the
presenters will not be expected to have read the other students’ papers. The nonpresenters will need to provide good enough wiki contributions to enable the presenters
to make the summaries. Thus, the presenters need to ask clarification questions in the
Wednesday-Friday discussion period, and the non-presenters need to revise their
contributions until they are clear.
Each student will be a presenter for exactly two weeks -- the schedule of the course will
be adjusted accordingly, depending on the number of students. (There is also a short
presentation of a white paper at the end of class; please see below.)
For each class (both Wednesdays and Mondays), the presenters should post their
presentation slides before class.
Some further guidelines will be provided for presentations, wiki postings, discussions,
and summarizations.
White Paper:
There will also be a 4-page white paper in the course that will bring together some of
your thoughts from the presentations, readings, and discussions throughout the course.
The white paper may be a position paper or a proposal for future research. (As the
purpose of this paper is to bring together material from the course, it need not consider
papers outside the set that are presented in class).
By November 3rd, you should write a thesis statement and outline for your white paper,
and meet with me about it. The white paper is due by December 3rd. During the last
week (finals week, during which graduate courses meet), students will make short
presentations of their white papers and the class will discuss them.
Further guidelines about the white paper will be provided.
Grade basis:
 Presentations and leading discussions (on wiki and in class) 35%
 Wiki postings 25%
 Non-presenter wiki discussions and clarifications 15%
 In-class participation 10%
 White paper 15% (presentation: 3%; paper 12%)
Academic Integrity: if you include material from any source in your presentations, wiki
postings, or projects, you must acknowledge it.
(*footnote: If we can find a time agreeable to everyone in the class, we may be able to
move it to a later time.)