1. 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.