Patterns in the stream

A qualitative examination of review texts suggests that there are consistent patterns to how topic and polarity are expressed in discourse. These patterns are visible in the text and paragraph structure, topic depth, and polarity flow. In this paper, we employ sentence-level sentiment classifiers and a hand-built tree ontology to investigate whether these patterns can be quantitatively identified in a large corpus of video game reviews. Our results indicate that the beginning and the end of major textual units (e.g. paragraphs) stand out in the flow of texts, showing a concentration of reliable opinion and key topic aspects, and that there are other important regularities in the expression of opinion and topic relevant to their ordering and the discourse markers with which they appear.