A linguistic interpretation of the OCC emotion model for affect sensing from text

Abstract

Numerous approaches have already been employed to 'sense' affective information from text; but none of those ever employed the OCC emotion model, an influential theory of the cognitive and appraisal structure of emotion. The OCC model derives 22 emotion types and two cognitive states as consequences of several cognitive variables. In this chapter, we propose to relate cognitive variables of the emotion model to linguistic components in text, in order to achieve emotion recognition for a much larger set of emotions than handled in comparable approaches. In particular, we provide tailored rules for textural emotion recognition, which are inspired by the rules of the OCC emotion model. Hereby, we clarify how text components can be mapped to specific values of the cognitive variables of the emotion model. The resulting linguistics-based rule set for the OCC emotion types and cognitive states allows us to determine a broad class of emotions conveyed by text. © 2009 Springer London.