Answering opinion questions from blogs

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If tonight, the president of the U.S. were to resign, only a few minutes later, opinions, beliefs and other comments would already flood the Web. As more and more textual information is available online, it has become necessary to develop natural language tools to help analyze informal texts quickly to make timely decisions. Recent developments in Question Answering (QA) have made it possible for users to ask a question in natural language and receive a specific answer rather than an entire document. However, to date, most work in QA has been involved in answering fact-based questions from formal and information-rich sources such as newspaper articles. However, as more and more people use the Web to express their opinions, the problem of answering opinion questions from informal documents will become an important issue.