Linguistic markers of moderate and absolute natural language

To identify such linguistic markers and test their generalizability, we conducted a text analysis of online reviews for films, tourist attractions and consumer products. All written reviews were accompanied by a rating scale (akin to Likert scale), which allowed us to label text samples as absolute/moderate. The data was split into independent 'training' and 'test' sets. Using the training set we identified a rank order of linguistic markers for absolute and moderate text, which were evaluated in a classifier on the test set. The top three markers alone (“but”, “!” and “seem”) produced 88% classification accuracy, which increased to 91% using 31 linguistic markers.