271 research outputs found
Word Affect Intensities
Words often convey affect -- emotions, feelings, and attitudes. Lexicons of
word-affect association have applications in automatic emotion analysis and
natural language generation. However, existing lexicons indicate only coarse
categories of affect association. Here, for the first time, we create an affect
intensity lexicon with real-valued scores of association. We use a technique
called best-worst scaling that improves annotation consistency and obtains
reliable fine-grained scores. The lexicon includes terms common from both
general English and terms specific to social media communications. It has close
to 6,000 entries for four basic emotions. We will be adding entries for other
affect dimensions shortly
Generating Music from Literature
We present a system, TransProse, that automatically generates musical pieces
from text. TransProse uses known relations between elements of music such as
tempo and scale, and the emotions they evoke. Further, it uses a novel
mechanism to determine sequences of notes that capture the emotional activity
in the text. The work has applications in information visualization, in
creating audio-visual e-books, and in developing music apps
The Effect of Negators, Modals, and Degree Adverbs on Sentiment Composition
Negators, modals, and degree adverbs can significantly affect the sentiment
of the words they modify. Often, their impact is modeled with simple
heuristics; although, recent work has shown that such heuristics do not capture
the true sentiment of multi-word phrases. We created a dataset of phrases that
include various negators, modals, and degree adverbs, as well as their
combinations. Both the phrases and their constituent content words were
annotated with real-valued scores of sentiment association. Using phrasal terms
in the created dataset, we analyze the impact of individual modifiers and the
average effect of the groups of modifiers on overall sentiment. We find that
the effect of modifiers varies substantially among the members of the same
group. Furthermore, each individual modifier can affect sentiment words in
different ways. Therefore, solutions based on statistical learning seem more
promising than fixed hand-crafted rules on the task of automatic sentiment
prediction.Comment: In Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Computational Approaches to
Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis (WASSA), San Diego,
California, 201
Using Nuances of Emotion to Identify Personality
Past work on personality detection has shown that frequency of lexical
categories such as first person pronouns, past tense verbs, and sentiment words
have significant correlations with personality traits. In this paper, for the
first time, we show that fine affect (emotion) categories such as that of
excitement, guilt, yearning, and admiration are significant indicators of
personality. Additionally, we perform experiments to show that the gains
provided by the fine affect categories are not obtained by using coarse affect
categories alone or with specificity features alone. We employ these features
in five SVM classifiers for detecting five personality traits through essays.
We find that the use of fine emotion features leads to statistically
significant improvement over a competitive baseline, whereas the use of coarse
affect and specificity features does not.Comment: In Proceedings of the ICWSM Workshop on Computational Personality
Recognition, July 2013, Boston, US
Distributional Measures of Semantic Distance: A Survey
The ability to mimic human notions of semantic distance has widespread
applications. Some measures rely only on raw text (distributional measures) and
some rely on knowledge sources such as WordNet. Although extensive studies have
been performed to compare WordNet-based measures with human judgment, the use
of distributional measures as proxies to estimate semantic distance has
received little attention. Even though they have traditionally performed poorly
when compared to WordNet-based measures, they lay claim to certain uniquely
attractive features, such as their applicability in resource-poor languages and
their ability to mimic both semantic similarity and semantic relatedness.
Therefore, this paper presents a detailed study of distributional measures.
Particular attention is paid to flesh out the strengths and limitations of both
WordNet-based and distributional measures, and how distributional measures of
distance can be brought more in line with human notions of semantic distance.
We conclude with a brief discussion of recent work on hybrid measures
- …