Hidden topic–emotion transition model for multi-level social emotion detection

With the fast development of online social platforms, social emotion detection, focusing on predicting readers’ emotions evoked by news articles, has been intensively investigated. Considering emotions as latent variables, various probabilistic graphical models have been proposed for emotion detection. However, the bag-of-words assumption prohibits those models from capturing the inter-relations between sentences in a document. Moreover, existing models can only detect emotions at either the document-level or the sentence-level. In this paper, we propose an effective Bayesian model, called hidden Topic–Emotion Transition model, by assuming that words in the same sentence share the same emotion and topic and modeling the emotions and topics in successive sentences as a Markov chain. By doing so, not only the document-level emotion but also the sentence-level emotion can be detected simultaneously. Experimental results on the two public corpora show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on both document-level and sentence-level emotion detection