Text-based emotion classification using emotion cause extraction

Abstract

In recent years, increasing impact of social networks on people's opinions and decision making has attracted lots of attention. Microblogging, one of the most popular social network applications that allows people to share ideas and discuss over various topics, is taken as a rich resource of opinion and emotion data. In this paper, we propose and implement a novel method for identifying emotions in microblog posts. Unlike traditional approaches which are mostly based on statistical methods, we try to infer and extract the reasons of emotions by importing knowledge and theories from other fields such as Sociology. Based on the theory that a triggering cause event is an integral part of emotion, the technique of emotion cause extraction is used as a crucial step to improve the quality of selected features. First, after thorough analysis on sample data we constructed an automatic rule-based system to detect and extract the cause event of each emotional post. We build an emotion corpus with Chinese microblog posts labeled by human annotators. Then a classifier is trained to classify emotions in microblog posts based on extracted cause events. The overall performance of our system is very promising. The experiment results show that our approach is effective in selecting informative features. Our system outperformed the baseline noticeably in most cases, suggesting its great potential. This exploration should provide a new way to look at the emotion classification task and lay the ground for future research on textual emotion processing. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.