A method for adaptively analyzing a natural language document containing at least one lexical item, said analysis to determine an attitude of an author towards an entity, comprising determining at least one actual valence for the at least one lexical item by analyzing the at least one lexical item in context, determining the attitude based on the at least one actual valence, associating the author, the entity and the attitude, and wherein the at least one lexical item encodes attitude information about the entity.