[jlees]

This doesn't feel like particularly new research - my PhD supervisor did work in the area of argumentative zoning nearly 10 years ago: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sht25/Project_Index/Citraz_Index.ht...

I initially started my PhD research looking at sentiment analysis on citations, but I found it wasn't a particularly interesting field. As the linked article says, negativity is pretty rare, and it's also something that human annotators disagree about a lot, as it can be expressed in some very subtle ways. The formality of paper publication has a lot to do about it; there are avenues for critical feedback and conflict well before the paper gets published.

I found that looking at how people talk about each other had a much richer depth of expression, although even more nuanced and harder to get annotators to agree about :)