Sentiment is a Relationship

For a long time I've thought of sentiment as being about a target. I used to think that things mentioned in text picked up sentiment from the words around them almost as if their sentiment "bleeds into the surrounding space to be absorbed by things around them."

About 2 weeks ago I changed my view. In a flash of realization, after reading a paper about analogy detection by Peter Turney, I realized that sentiment is just another relationship between two things located in the text. Furthermore, I realized that what I should really be doing is figuring out what the characteristics of this relationship are so that I might be able to differentiate it from a host of other relationships.

After seeing a quote in Matt's recent post about Opinion Mining Startups:

Jodange specializes in sentiment mining, deriving tuples of the form <holder, opinion, target>

I was pleased to see that at least someone else holds my newfound world view, but I think that there are other types of tuples applicable to sentiment analysis.