How Factuality Determines Sentiment Inferences

Abstract

In a complex sentence comprised of one or more subclauses, the overt or hidden attitudes between the various entities depend on the factuality projection of the verbs, their polar effects, and the modality and affirmative status (negated or not) of the clauses. If factuality is given, some referents might even be considered to benefit or to suffer from the (effects of the) described situation, independently of their relations to the other referents. An interesting question is, how the reader evaluates all this from his/her perspective. We introduce an approach based on Description Logics that integrates these various perspectives into a joint model.