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