23. The method of claim 12 , wherein in the representation, the effective opinion is graphically represented.
12. A method for assisting an author, comprising: receiving an author's review of an item which includes text and an associated author's rating of the item on a predefined scale; parsing the text of the author's review of the item to identify opinion expressions in the input text; with a processor, generating an analysis of the text, based on the identified opinion expressions including computing an effective opinion of the text as a function of a measure of polarity associated with each of the identified opinion expressions, the measure of polarity being is based on the polarity measure associated with respective adjectival terms from a polar vocabulary that are in the opinion expressions, the polar vocabulary associating a polarity measure with each of a set of adjectival terms, the polarity measure being based on ratings of reviews in a corpus of reviews from which the respective adjectival term was extracted; comparing the effective opinion with the author's rating to determine whether the text and the author's rating are coherent; and generating a representation of the analysis for display on a user interface, the representation of the analysis including a representation of the effective opinion.