As of February 2016 Facebook allows users to express their experienced
emotions about a post by using five so-called `reactions'. This research paper
proposes and evaluates alternative methods for predicting these reactions to
user posts on public pages of firms/companies (like supermarket chains). For
this purpose, we collected posts (and their reactions) from Facebook pages of
large supermarket chains and constructed a dataset which is available for other
researches. In order to predict the distribution of reactions of a new post,
neural network architectures (convolutional and recurrent neural networks) were
tested using pretrained word embeddings. Results of the neural networks were
improved by introducing a bootstrapping approach for sentiment and emotion
mining on the comments for each post. The final model (a combination of neural
network and a baseline emotion miner) is able to predict the reaction
distribution on Facebook posts with a mean squared error (or misclassification
rate) of 0.135.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures and accepted at ICAART 2018. (Dataset:
https://github.com/jerryspan/FacebookR