Experience mining: Building a large-scale database of personal experiences and opinions from web documents

This paper proposes a new UGC-oriented language technology application, which we call experience mining. Experience mining aims at automatically collecting instances of personal experiences as well as opinions from an explosive number of user generated contents (UGCs) such as weblog and forum posts and storing them in an experience database with semantically rich indices. After arguing the technical issues of this new task, we focus on the central problem, factuality analysis, among others and propose a machine learning-based solution as well as the task definition itself. Our empirical evaluation indicates that our factuality analysis task is sufficiently well-defined to achieve a high inter-annotator agreement and our Factorial CRF-based model considerably outperforms the baseline. We also present an application system, which currently stores over 50M experience instances extracted from 150M Japanese blog posts with semantic indices and is scheduled to start serving as an experience search engine for unrestricted users in October.