Exploring the Compositionality of Emotions in Text: Word Emotions, Sentence Emotions and Automated Tagging

This paper presents an approach to automated marking up of texts with emotional labels. The approach considers the representation of emotions as emotional dimensions. A corpus of example texts previously annotated by human evaluators is mined for an initial assignment of emotional features to words. This results in a List of Emotional Words (LEW) which becomes a useful resource for later automated mark up. An algorithm for the automated mark up of text is proposed. This algorithm mirrors closely the steps taken during feature extraction, employing for the actual assignment of emotional features a combination of the LEW resource, the ANEW word list, and WordNet for knowledge-based expansion of words not occurring in either. The algorithm for automated mark up is tested against texts from the original samples used for feature extraction to test its correctness. It is also tested against new text samples to test its coverage. The results are discussed with respect to two main issues: correctness and coverage of the proposed algorithm, and additional techniques and solutions that may be employed to improve the results.

[1]  George A. Miller,et al.  WordNet: A Lexical Database for English , 1995, HLT.

[2]  Dekang Lin,et al.  Dependency-Based Evaluation of Minipar , 2003 .

[3]  Marshall S. Smith,et al.  The general inquirer: A computer approach to content analysis. , 1967 .

[4]  Carlo Strapparava,et al.  WordNet Affect: an Affective Extension of WordNet , 2004, LREC.

[5]  A. Friederici,et al.  Accentuation and emotions - two different systems? , 2000 .

[6]  Henry Lieberman,et al.  Automatic Affective Feedback in an Email Browser , 2002 .

[7]  Douglas B. Lenat,et al.  CYC: a large-scale investment in knowledge infrastructure , 1995, CACM.

[8]  Roddy Cowie,et al.  Describing the emotional states that are expressed in speech , 2003, Speech Commun..

[9]  C. Izard.  The face of emotion , 1971 .

[10]  M. Dyer.  Emotions and their computations: Three computer models , 1987 .

[11]  Martin F. Porter,et al.  An algorithm for suffix stripping , 1997, Program.

[12]  M. Bradley,et al.  Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW): Instruction Manual and Affective Ratings , 1999 .

[13]  Andrew Ortony,et al.  The Cognitive Structure of Emotions , 1988 .

[14]  Philip J. Stone,et al.  Extracting Information. (Book Reviews: The General Inquirer. A Computer Approach to Content Analysis) , 1967 .

[15]  Push Singh,et al.  The Public Acquisition of Commonsense Knowledge , 2002 .

[16]  M. Bradley,et al.  Affective Normsfor English Words (ANEW): Stimuli, instruction manual and affective ratings (Tech Report C-1) , 1999 .

[17]  P. Lang.  Behavioral treatment and bio-behavioral assessment: computer applications , 1980 .

[18]  Henry Lieberman,et al.  A model of textual affect sensing using real-world knowledge , 2003, IUI '03.