Subjectivity and objectivity detection

Question

I am trying to separate subjective and objective sentences from eachother, I tried to find some good research papers in this area but all of the work is in sentiment analysis and I could not find any good paper just focusing on subjectivity and objectivity of the text... So now my question is how should I interpret interpret subjective and objective text? Is it possible to have a subjective sentence which is neutral in terms of sentiment? or when I say "I went to school", is it subjective or objective(I assume it is subjective since it is not about general fact)?

Answer 1

Actually, there are a lot of works devoted to subjectivity detection (as opposed to polarity detection; both tasks - SD and PD - are subtasks of sentiment analysis), see for example google scholar or start from classic (see sections 1.5 and 4.1.2)

Pang, B., & Lee, L. (2008). Opinion mining and sentiment analysis. Foundations and trends in information retrieval, 2(1-2), 1-135.

Citing this work, "Synonyms: opinion, view, belief, conviction, persuasion, sentiment mean a judgment one holds as true.

• opinion implies a conclusion thought out yet open to dispute (each expert seemed to have a different opinion).
• view suggests a subjective opinion (very assertive in stating his views).
• belief implies often deliberate acceptance and intellectual assent (a firm belief in her party’s platform).
• conviction applies to a firmly and seriously held belief (the conviction that animal life is as sacred as human).
• persuasion suggests a belief grounded on assurance (as by evidence) of its truth (was of the persuasion that everything changes).
• sentiment suggests a settled opinion reflective of one’s feelings (her feminist sentiments are well-known)."

"In 1994, Wiebe [312] (...) centered the idea of subjectivity around that of private states, defined by Quirk et al. [246] as states that are not open to objective observation or verification"

However, from my point of view, your example contradicts to common notion of subjective/objective texts: almost all would classify "I went to school" as objective, because it contains no opinion (or other synonyms from the list above).

Your motivation "it is not about general fact" lacks definition of 'general fact'. And if you really want to distinguish general facts from others, then most probably it has no relation to sentiment analysis and, particularly, subjectivity detection.