An emotional mess! Deciding on a framework for building a Dutch emotion-annotated corpus

Seeing the myriad of existing emotion models, with the categorical versus dimensional opposition the most important dividing line, building an emotion-annotated corpus requires some well thought-out strategies concerning framework choice. In our work on automatic emotion detection in Dutch texts, we investigate this problem by means of two case studies. We find that the labels joy, love, anger, sadness and fear are well-suited to annotate texts coming from various domains and topics, but that the connotation of the labels strongly depends on the origin of the texts. Moreover, it seems that information is lost when an emotional state is forcedly classified in a limited set of categories, indicating that a bi-representational format is desirable when creating an emotion corpus.Seeing the myriad of existing emotion models, with the categorical versus dimensional opposition the most important dividing line, building an emotion-annotated corpus requires some well thought-out strategies concerning framework choice. In our work on automatic emotion detection in Dutch texts, we investigate this problem by means of two case studies. We find that the labels joy, love, anger, sadness and fear are well-suited to annotate texts coming from various domains and topics, but that the connotation of the labels strongly depends on the origin of the texts. Moreover, it seems that information is lost when an emotional state is forcedly classified in a limited set of categories, indicating that a bi-representational format is desirable when creating an emotion corpus.P

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

Sentiment analysis tools should take account of the number of exclamation marks!!!

There are various factors that affect the sentiment level expressed in textual comments. Capitalization of letters tends to mark something for attention and repeating of letters tends to strengthen the emotion. Emoticons are used to help visualize facial expressions which can affect understanding of text. In this paper, we show the effect of the number of exclamation marks used, via testing with twelve online sentiment tools. We present opinions gathered from 500 respondents towards “like” and “dislike” values, with a varying number of exclamation marks. Results show that only 20% of the online sentiment tools tested considered the number of exclamation marks in their returned scores. However, results from our human raters show that the more exclamation marks used for positive comments, the more they have higher “like” values than the same comments with fewer exclamations marks. Similarly, adding more exclamation marks for negative comments, results in a higher “dislike”

Text to Emotion Extraction Using Supervised Machine Learning Techniques

Proliferation of internet and social media has greatly increased the popularity of text communication. People convey their sentiment and emotion through text which promotes lively communication. Consequently, a tremendous amount of emotional text is generated on different social media and blogs in every moment. This has raised the necessity of automated tool for emotion mining from text. There are various rule based approaches of emotion extraction form text based on emotion intensity lexicon. However, creating emotion intensity lexicon is a time consuming and tedious process. Moreover, there is no hard and fast rule for assigning emotion intensity to words. To solve these difficulties, we propose a machine learning based approach of emotion extraction from text which relies on annotated example rather emotion intensity lexicon. We investigated Multinomial Naïve Bayesian (MNB) Classifier, Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) for mining emotion from text. In our setup, SVM outperformed other classifiers with promising accuracy