Abstract
This chapter uses Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) theory as a basis for extracting semantic features of documents. We focus on the pronominal and determination system and the role it plays in constructing interpersonal distance. By using a hierarchical system model that represents the author’s language choices, it is possible to construct a richer and more informative feature representation with superior computational efficiency than the usual bag-of-words approach. Experiments within the context of financial scam classification show that these systemic features can create clear separation between registers with different interpersonal distance. This approach is generalizable to other aspects of attitude and affect that have been modelled within the systemic functional linguistic theory.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
6. Bibliography
Argamon, S. and Dodick, J. Conjunction and Modal Assessment in Genre Classification: A Corpus-Based Study of Historical and Experimental Science Writing. In this volume, Shanahan J. G., Qu Y., Wiebe J. (Eds.) Computing Attitude and Affect in Text. Springer, Berlin.
Biggs, B. (1990) In the Beginning, The Oxford Illustrated History of New Zealand. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Biggs, B. (1997) He Whirwhiringa Selected Readings in Maori. Auckland University Press, Auckland.
Couchman, M. (2001) Transposing culture: A tri-stratal exploration of the meaning making of two cultures. Honours thesis, Macquarie University.
Eggins, S., Wignell, P. and Martin, J. R. (1993) Register analysis: theory and practice. In The discourse of history: distancing the recoverable past, 75–109, Pinter, London.
Halliday, M. A. K. and Hasan, R. (1985) Language, Context and Text: a social semiotic perspective. Geelong, Victoria: Deakin University Press.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1994) Introduction to Functional Grammar. Edward Arnold, second edition.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1995) Computing Meaning: some reflections on past experience and present prospects. Paper presented to PACLING95, Brisbane, April, 1995.
Hasan, R. (1996) Ways of saying, ways of meaning: selected papers of Ruqaiya Hasan. Cassell, London.
Herke-Couchman, M. A. (2003) Arresting the scams: Using systemic functional theory to solve a hi-tech social problem. In Australian SFL Association Conference 2003.
Iedema, R., Feez, S. and White, P. (1995) Media literacy. Sydney, Metropolitan East Disadvantaged Schools Program.
Kessler, B., Nunberg, G., and Shutze, H. (1997) Automatic detection of text genre. In Philip R. Cohen and Wolfgang Wahlster (Eds), Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the ACL and Eigth Conference of the EACL, 32–38, Somerset, New Jersey.
Mann, W. C. and Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (1985). Nigel: A systemic grammar for text generation. In Benson, R. and Greaves, J. (Eds), Systemic Perspectives on Discourse: Selected Papers from the 9th International Systemic Workshop. Ablex.
Mann, W. C. and Thompson, S. A. (1988) Rhetorical structure theory: Toward a functional theory of text organisation. Text, 8(3), 243–281.
Martin, J. R. and Rose, D. (2003). Working with Discourse: Meaning Beyond the Clause. Continuum, London and New York.
Martin, J. R. (2004) Mourning: how we get aligned. In Discourse & Society 15.2/3 (Special Issue on ‘Discourse around 9/11’). 321–344.
Matthiessen, C. M. I. M (1993) Register analysis: theory and practice. In Register in the round: diversity in a unified theory of register. 221–292. Pinter, London.
Matthiessen, C. M. I. M (1995) Lexico-grammatical cartography: English systems. International Language Sciences Publishers.
Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2003). Frequency Profiles of some basic grammatical systems: an interim report. Macquarie University.
Munro, R. (2003) Towards a computational inference and application of a functional grammar, Honours thesis, University of Sydney, 2003.
O’Donnell, M. (1994) Sentence analysis and generation: a systemic perspective. PhD thesis, University of Sydney.
O’Donnell, M. (2002) Automating the coding of semantic patterns: applying machine learning to corpus linguistics. In Proceedings of the 29th International Systemic Functional Workshop. University of Liverpool.
Quinlan, J. R. (1993) C4.5: Programs for Machine Learning. Morgan Kaufmann.
Riloff, E., Wiebe, J. and Wilson, T. (2003), Learning subjective nouns using extraction pattern bootstrapping. In Proceedings of CoNLL-2003, 25–32. Edmonton, Canada.
Sebastiani, F. (2002) Machine learning in automated text categorization. ACM Computing Surveys, 34(1), 1–47.
Sebastiani, F. (2004). Text Categorization. In Alessandro Zanasi (Ed.), Text Mining and its Applications, WIT Press, Southampton, UK.
Taboada, M. and Grieve, J. Analysing Appraisal Automatically. In Shanahan J. G., Qu Y., Wiebe J. (Eds.) Computing Attitude and Affect in Text. Springer, Berlin.
Turney, P. (2002) Thumbs up or thumbs down? Semantic orientation applied to unsupervised classification of reviews. In Proceedings 40th Annual Meeting of the ACL (ACL’02), 417–424
Wiebe, J. (1990) Recognizing Subjective Sentences: A Computational Investigation of Narrative Text. PhD thesis, State University of New York at Buffalo.
Witten, I.H. and Eibe, F. (1999) Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques with Java Implementations. Morgan Kaufmann.
Whitelaw, C. and Argamon, S. (2004) Systemic Functional Features for Stylistic Text Categorization. In Proceedings of the AAAI 2004 Fall Symposium on Style and Meaning in Language, Art, Music, and Design. AAAI Press.
Wu, C. (2000) Modelling Linguistic Resources: A Systemic Functional Approach. Unpublished PhD thesis, Macquarie University, Sydney.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2006 Springer
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Whitelaw, C., Patrick, J., Herke-Couchman, M. (2006). Identifying Interpersonal Distance using Systemic Features. In: Shanahan, J.G., Qu, Y., Wiebe, J. (eds) Computing Attitude and Affect in Text: Theory and Applications. The Information Retrieval Series, vol 20. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4102-0_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4102-0_16
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-4026-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-4020-4102-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)