Exploiting subjectivity classification to improve information extraction

Information extraction (IE) systems are prone to false hits for a variety of reasons and we observed that many of these false hits occur in sentences that contain subjective language (e.g., opinions, emotions, and sentiments). Motivated by these observations, we explore the idea of using subjectivity analysis to improve the precision of information extraction systems. In this paper, we describe an IE system that uses a subjective sentence classifier to filter its extractions. We experimented with several different strategies for using the subjectivity classifications, including an aggressive strategy that discards all extractions found in subjective sentences and more complex strategies that selectively discard extractions. We evaluated the performance of these different approaches on the MUC-4 terrorism data set. We found that indiscriminately filtering extractions from subjective sentences was overly aggressive, but more selective filtering strategies improved IE precision with minimal recall loss.