Sources of Opinion

Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, University of Applied Sciences in Konin, Poland
barbara.lewandowska-tomaszczyk@konin.edu.pl

Sources of opinion identification can be manifold, according to Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk et al, - from linguistic verbal signals of various kinds to multimodal resources (gestures, facial expression, eye contact, body posture and movement, etc. and prosodic features). More generally, the sources of opinions as different from evidence-based knowledge can be found in gossip, hearsay, in which no evidence needs to be present, those with uncertain evidence such as beliefs, or else opinions stemming from logical fallacies or conspiracy theories, fake news, together with myths, stereotypes, ideology, etc. (456).

Opinions can also originate from deeper psychological and social roots. Factors such as upbringing, family environment, education, and cultural background often shape the way individuals form opinions, even before they are expressed through language. Similarly, exposure to art, nature, or emotional experiences may also influence opinion formation in less direct but meaningful ways. On the other hand, Stefkovics and Dömötör, for example, find that public opinion, derived from the polling data, can be influenced by public relations and the political media. Additionally, mass media utilises a wide variety of advertising techniques to get their message out and change the minds of people.

It should also be mentioned that computational methods view opinion source identification as an information extraction task and tackle the problem using sequence tagging and pattern matching techniques simultaneously with reference to syntactic, semantic, and orthographic lexical features, dependency parse features, and opinion recognition features. In addition, Choi et al see features based on automatically learned extraction patterns are used, performing feature induction on models.

Keywords: information extraction, verbal signals, multimodel resources, uncertain evidence

Related Entries: Public Opinion, Semantics, Sourcing

References:
Choi, Y., Cardie, C., Riloff, E., & Patwardhan, S. (2005, October). Identifying sources of opinions with conditional random fields and extraction patterns. In Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference and Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (HLT/EMNLP) (pp. 355–362). Vancouver, Canada. https://aclanthology.org/H05-1045/
Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B., Liebeskind, C., Baczkowska, A., Ruzaitė, J., Dylgjeri, A., Kazazi, L., & Lombart, E. (2023). Opinion events: Types and opinion markers in English social media discourse. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 19(2), 447–481. https://doi.org/10.1515/lpp-2023-0022
Stefkovics, Á., & Dömötör, G. (2025). Trust in election polls: The role of the source institution and the results of the poll. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 37(2), edaf018. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijpor/edaf018