Affect Computation of Chinese Short Text

Microblogs are a rising social network with distinguishing features such as simplicity and convenience and has already attracted a large number of users and triggered massive information explosion concerning individuals’ own statuses and opinions. While sentiment analysis of the messages in microblogs is of great value, most of present studies are on English microblogs and few are on Chinese microblogs. Compared to English, Chinese has its unique expression style, such as no spaces or other word delimiters. Furthermore, Chinese short text also has its own properties. Thus we are inspired to explore effective features for sentiment classification of Chinese short text. In this paper, we propose to study userrelated sentiment classification of Chinese microblogs in terms of the statistical and semantic characteristics, and deisgn the corresponding features: ratio of positive words and negative words (PNR), position feature (POS ), collocation of verbs (COL), auxiliary words (AU). Then we employ an SVM-based method to classify the sentiment. Experiments show that the features we design is effective in recognizing the sentiment of messages in microblogs. key words: microblog, sentiment classification, statistical feature, semantic feature