Connotation Frames: A Data-Driven Investigation

Understand

Through a particular choice of a predicate (e.g., "x violated y"), a writer can subtly connote a range of implied sentiments and presupposed facts about the entities x and y: (1) writer's perspective: projecting x as an "antagonist"and y as a "victim", (2) entities' perspective: y probably dislikes x, (3) effect: something bad happened to y, (4) value: y is something valuable, and (5) mental state: y is distressed by the event.

• We introduce connotation frames as a representation formalism to organize these rich dimensions of connotation using typed relations.
• First, we investigate the feasibility of obtaining connotative labels through crowdsourcing experiments.
• We then present models for predicting the connotation frames of verb predicates based on their distributional word representations and the interplay between different types of connotative relations.