OPINION MINING AND LEXICAL AFFECT SENSING DISSERTATION ZUR ERLANGUNG DES GRADES DOKTOR DER NATURWISSENSCHAFTEN (DR. RER. NAT.) DER FAKULTÄT FÜR ANGEWANDTE INFORMATIK DER UNIVERSITÄT AUGSBURG VORGELEGT VON ALEXANDER OSHERENKO 2010 Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Elisabeth André Zweitgutachter Prof. Dr. Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang Minker Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 30. Juni 2010 ABSTRACT This dissertation investigates opinion mining and lexical affect sensing. It discusses emotional corpora and describes different approaches to affect categorization of their texts: a statistical approach that utilizes lexical, deictic, stylometric, and grammatical information; a semantic approach that relies on emotional dictionaries and on deep grammatical analysis; and a hybrid approach that combines the statistical approach and the semantic approach. Furthermore, this thesis explores affect sensing using multimodal fusion. In conclusion, the thesis discusses significant contributions and describes future work. Вере Ма ле во й ...нет правды на земле, но правды нет и выше. Пушкин «Моцарт и Сальери» ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to convey special thanks to my supervisor at the University of Ausgburg, Prof. Elisabeth André, for accepting me as her PhD student, for giving her time freely to advise me in my work and making many helpful suggestions on my reports despite her busy schedule.