Method and system for extracting opinions from text documents

1. A method performed on a computer for extracting opinions about a subject of interest from a text document having a plurality of sentences, the subject associated with a plurality of features, the method comprising:

determining from the document feature terms related to the features most relevant to the subject, comprising:

determining a definite article is located at the beginning of a sentence in the plurality of sentences; and

determining the definite article precedes the feature term;

extracting from the document feature terms related to the features most relevant to the subject;

for each sentence referring to a feature term, determining whether the sentence includes an opinion polarity about the feature term;

for each sentence referring to the subject, determining whether the sentence includes an opinion polarity about the subject,

wherein the determining comprises:

identifying opinion terms in the sentence using an opinion dictionary, each entry in the dictionary having an opinion term, a part-of-speech tag, and an associated opinion polarity,

for each sentence having a feature term and an opinion term, parsing the sentence with an English parser to identify grammatical components in the sentence and relationships between said components, and

identifying an opinion polarity associated with said feature term using the opinion dictionary,

wherein:

the grammatical components include verb phrases, subject phrases, object phrases, complements, and prepositional phrases, and

each feature term may have a modifier describing the feature term, and the identifying includes for each sentence having a verb phrase where the verb phrase has no matching entry in the opinion dictionary, assigning an opinion polarity of the modifier of the feature term to the feature term, the opinion polarity of the modifier being defined in the opinion dictionary; and

deriving an opinion skeleton for each of the extracted opinion, thereby providing supporting details for this opinion.

2. The method as recited in claim 1 , wherein the opinion polarity associated with the feature term is identified based on an opinion rule.

3. The method as recited in claim 2 , wherein the rule base comprises a plurality of rules each having a relationship term, a target of the opinion, and a polarity of the opinion.

4. The method as recited in claim 2 , wherein the rule base comprises a plurality of rules each having a relationship term, a source of the opinion, and a target of the opinion.

5. The method as recited in claim 4 , wherein the target of the opinion is a component of the sentence to which the opinion is to be assigned.

6. The method as recited in claim 4 , wherein the source of the opinion is a component of the sentence of which opinion polarity is to be assigned to the target.