A corpus analysis of online news comments using the Appraisal framework

We present detailed analyses of the distribution of Appraisal categories (Martin and White, 2005) in a corpus of online news comments. The corpus consists of just over one thousand comments posted in response to a variety of opinion pieces on the website of the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail. We annotated all the comments with labels corresponding to different categories of the Appraisal framework. Analyses of the annotations show that comments are overwhelmingly negative, and that they favour two of the subtypes of Attitude (Judgment and Appreciation) over the third, Affect. The paper contributes a methodology for annotating Appraisal, and results that show the interaction of Appraisal with negation, the constructive (or not) nature of comments, and the level of toxicity found in them. The results show that highly opinionated language is expressed as an objective opinion (Judgement and Appreciation) rather than an emotional reaction (Affect). This finding, together with the interplay of evaluative language with constructiveness and toxicity in the comments, can be applied to the automatic moderation of comments.