Extracting Opinion and Factivity from Italian Political Discourse

The success of a newspaper article for the public opinion can be measured by the degree in which the journalist is able to report and modify (if needed) attitudes, opinions, feelings and political beliefs. We present a symbolic system for Italian, derived from GETARUNS, which integrates a range of natural language processing tools (also available in the public domain) with the intent to characterise the print press discourse from a semantic and pragmatic point of view. This has been done on some 500K words of text, extracted from three Italian newspapers in order to highlight their stance on the deep political crisis situation which brought to the change of government that took place at the end of 2011. We tried two different approaches: a lexicon-based approach for semantic polarity using off-the-shelf dictionaries with the addition of manually supervised domain related concepts. Another one is a feature-based semantic and pragmatic approach, which computes propositional level analysis on the basis of the verbal complex and other semantic markers to process factuality and subjectivity. Results are quite revealing and contradict the otherwise common knowledge about the political stance of each newspaper on such topic.