A system for summarizing and visualizing arguments in subjective documents

On the World Wide Web, the volume of subjective information, such as opinions and reviews, has been increasing rapidly. The trends and rules latent in a large set of subjective descriptions can potentially be useful for decision-making purposes. In this paper, we propose a method for summarizing subjective descriptions, specifically opinions in Japanese. We visualize the pro and con arguments for a target topic, such as "Should Japan introduce the summertime system?" Users can summarize the arguments about the topic in order to choose a more reasonable standpoint for decision making. We evaluate our system, called "OpinionReader", experimentally.