An Empirical Analysis of the Role of Amplifiers, Downtoners, and Negations in Emotion Classification in Microblogs

The effect of amplifiers, downtoners, and negations has been studied in general and particularly in the context of sentiment analysis. However, there is only limited work which aims at transferring the results and methods to discrete classes of emotions, e. g., joy, anger, fear, sadness, surprise, and disgust. For instance, it is not straight-forward to interpret which emotion the phrase "not happy" expresses. With this paper, we aim at obtaining a better understanding of such modifiers in the context of emotion-bearing words and their impact on document-level emotion classification, namely, microposts on Twitter. We select an appropriate scope detection method for modifiers of emotion words, incorporate it in a document-level emotion classification model as additional bag of words and show that this approach improves the performance of emotion classification. In addition, we build a term weighting approach based on the different modifiers into a lexical model for the analysis of the semantics of modifiers and their impact on emotion meaning. We show that amplifiers separate emotions expressed with an emotion- bearing word more clearly from other secondary connotations. Downtoners have the opposite effect. In addition, we discuss the meaning of negations of emotion-bearing words. For instance we show empirically that "not happy" is closer to sadness than to anger and that fear-expressing words in the scope of downtoners often express surprise.Comment: Accepted for publication at The 5th IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics (DSAA), https://dsaa2018.isi.it

A Description of Ternate Malay

Ternate Malay is a local variety of Malay in Ternate, a small island in the Maluku Utara province in eastern Indonesia. The majority of speakers live in Ternate town, where it serves as mother tongue as well as a means of communication between people of various ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. In the last few decades there is a growing scholarly interest in local Malay varieties, particularly in the eastern part of Indonesia. This article is a short description of Ternate Malay based on the idea that words in Ternate Malay receive their meaning in the combination with other words and that the linguistic context as well as the non-linguistic situation in which they occur, determine the most suitable interpretation of utterances. It is shown how certain words facilitate the determination of the interpretation

Speaker emotion can affect ambiguity production

Does speaker emotion affect degree of ambiguity in referring expressions? We used referential communication tasks preceded by mood induction to examine whether positive emotional valence may be linked to ambiguity of referring expressions. In Experiment 1, participants had to identify sequences of objects with homophonic labels (e.g., the animal bat, a baseball bat) for hypothetical addressees. This required modification of the homophones. Happy speakers were less likely to modify the second homophone to repair a temporary ambiguity (i.e., they were less likely to say … first cover the bat, then cover the baseball bat …). In Experiment 2, participants had to identify one of two identical objects in an object array, which required a modifying relative clause (the shark that's underneath the shoe). Happy speakers omitted the modifying relative clause twice as often as neutral speakers (e.g., by saying Put the shark underneath the sheep), thereby rendering the entire utterance ambiguous in the context of two sharks. The findings suggest that one consequence of positive mood appears to be more ambiguity in speech. This effect is hypothesised to be due to a less effortful processing style favouring an egocentric bias impacting perspective taking or monitoring of alignment of utterances with an addressee's perspective

Are affective speakers effective speakers? – Exploring the link between the vocal expression of positive emotions and communicative effectiveness

This thesis explores the effect of vocal affect expression on communicative effectiveness. Two studies examined whether positive speaker affect facilitates the encoding and decoding of the message, combining methods from Phonetics and Psychology.This research has been funded through a Faculty Studentship by the University of Stirling and a Fellowship by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)

Adposition and Case Supersenses v2.5: Guidelines for English

This document offers a detailed linguistic description of SNACS (Semantic Network of Adposition and Case Supersenses; Schneider et al., 2018), an inventory of 50 semantic labels ("supersenses") that characterize the use of adpositions and case markers at a somewhat coarse level of granularity, as demonstrated in the STREUSLE corpus (https://github.com/nert-gu/streusle/; version 4.3 tracks guidelines version 2.5). Though the SNACS inventory aspires to be universal, this document is specific to English; documentation for other languages will be published separately. Version 2 is a revision of the supersense inventory proposed for English by Schneider et al. (2015, 2016) (henceforth "v1"), which in turn was based on previous schemes. The present inventory was developed after extensive review of the v1 corpus annotations for English, plus previously unanalyzed genitive case possessives (Blodgett and Schneider, 2018), as well as consideration of adposition and case phenomena in Hebrew, Hindi, Korean, and German. Hwang et al. (2017) present the theoretical underpinnings of the v2 scheme. Schneider et al. (2018) summarize the scheme, its application to English corpus data, and an automatic disambiguation task

Exploring the effects of phrase-final lengthening in Italian Sign Language (LIS) noun phrases

Phrase-final lengthening is a quite common prosodic phenomenon, previously accounted for in several spoken and signed languages. This study aims at investigating the prosodic cues produced in correspondence with the final boundary of noun phrases in Italian Sign Language (LIS), analyzing corpus data from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. The quantitative analysis confirms that noun phrases in LIS are affected by phrase-final lengthening (i.e. in noun phrases including one nominal modifier, on average, postnominal modifiers are longer than prenominal ones) and reveals that the various modifier classes show different degrees of sensitivity to this phenomenon. Building on these results, the qualitative analysis explores in detail those modifier classes that show lengthening effects in the corpus: the main consequences in the phonological makeup of signs are insertion of movement repetition, prolonged path movement, final hold accompanied by head nod, and weak prop. The study also offers possible explanations for the fact that quantifiers, ordinals, and determinerlike pointing signs are less sensitive to lengthening effects in the phrase-final boundary, suggesting that particular morphosyntactic factors may come into play.---Original in English.Phrase-final lengthening is a quite common prosodic phenomenon, previously accounted for in several spoken and signed languages. This study aims at investigating the prosodic cues produced in correspondence with the final boundary of noun phrases in Italian Sign Language (LIS), analyzing corpus data from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. The quantitative analysis confirms that noun phrases in LIS are affected by phrase-final lengthening (i.e. in noun phrases including one nominal modifier, on average, postnominal modifiers are longer than prenominal ones) and reveals that the various modifier classes show different degrees of sensitivity to this phenomenon. Building on these results, the qualitative analysis explores in detail those modifier classes that show lengthening effects in the corpus: the main consequences in the phonological makeup of signs are insertion of movement repetition, prolonged path movement, final hold accompanied by head nod, and weak prop. The study also offers possible explanations for the fact that quantifiers, ordinals, and determinerlike pointing signs are less sensitive to lengthening effects in the phrase-final boundary, suggesting that particular morphosyntactic factors may come into play.-----------------------------------------------------------------------------EXPLORANDO OS EFEITOS DO ALONGAMENTO EM FINAL EM SINTAGMAS NOMINAIS DA LÍNGUA DE SINAIS ITALIANA (LIS)O alongamento final é um fenômeno prosódico comum, que já foi observado em diversas línguas orais e de sinais. Este estudo tem por objetivo investigar as pistas prosódicas produzidas em correspondência com os limites do sintagma nominal na língua de sinais italiana (LIS), analisando dados quantitativos e qualitativos oriundos de corpus. A análise quantitativa confirma que os sintagmas nominais em LIS são afetados pelo alongamento final (ex: em sintagmas nominais que incluem um modificador nominal, em média, modificadores pós-nominais são mais longos em comparação com os pré-nominais) e revela que as várias classes de modificadores exibem diferentes graus de sensitividade a este fenômeno. A partir dos resultados, a análise qualitativa explora em detalhes as classes de modificadores que demonstram os efeitos do alongamento no corpus: as principais consequências para a constituição fonológica dos sinais são a adição de uma repetição do movimento, um prolongamento da trajetória do movimento, suspensão final acompanhada por um aceno de cabeça e a sustentação fraca do sinal. O estudo traz também possíveis explicações para o fato de que os sinais quantificadores, ordinais e as apontações com função de determinante são menos sensíveis aos efeitos de alongamento nos limites fronteiriços entre os sintagmas, sugerindo que alguns fatores específicos de ordem morfossintática possam estar também em jogo.---Original em inglês