Patent ID: 7369985

Claim:
A method for adaptively analyzing a natural language document containing at least one lexical item, said analysis to determine an attitude of an author towards an entity, comprising: determining at least one actual valence for the at least one lexical item by analyzing the at least one lexical item in context; determining the attitude based on the at least one actual valence; associating the author, the entity and the attitude; wherein the at least one lexical item encodes attitude information about the entity; determining at least one base valence for the at least one lexical item; and wherein analyzing the at least one lexical item includes adjusting the at least one base valence based on a contextual valence shifter (CVS) which can have a negative impact on the at least one base valence if the consequences of a not born-out expectation are negative and can have a positive impact on the at least one base valence if the consequences of the not born-out expectation are positive.