As has been previously observed and exploited in the NLP literature (Pang and Lee, 2004;Agarwal and Bhattacharyya, 2005;Barzilay and Lapata, 2005), the above optimization function, unlike many others that have been proposed for graph or set partitioning, can be solved exactly in an provably efficient manner via methods for finding minimum cuts in graphs.
we then define the strength agr of the agreement link corresponding to the reference as: The free parameter α specifies the relative impor-7 One subtlety is that for the purposes of mining agreement cues (but not for evaluating overall support/oppose classification accuracy), we temporarily re-inserted into our dataset previously filtered speech segments containing the term "yield", since the yielding of time on the House floor typically indicates agreement even though the yield statements contain little relevant text on their own.