Annotating expressions of opinion and emotion in the italian content annotation bank

In this paper we describe the result of manually annotating I-CAB, the Italian Content Annotation Bank, by expressions of private state (EPSs), i.e., expressions that denote the presence of opinions, emotions, and other cognitive states. The aim of this effort was the generation of a standard resource for supporting the development of opinion extraction algorithms for Italian, and of a benchmark for testing such algorithms. To this end we have employed a previously existing annotation language (here dubbed WWC, from the initials of its proponents). We here describe the results of this annotation effort, including the results of a thorough inter-annotator agreement test. We conclude by discussing how WWC can be adapted to the specificities of a Romance language such as Italian.