Emotion classification using massive examples extracted from the Web

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a data-oriented method for inferring the emotion of a speaker conversing with a dialog system from the semantic content of an utterance. We first fully automatically obtain a huge collection of emotion-provoking event instances from the Web. With Japanese chosen as a target language, about 1.3 million emotion provoking event instances are extracted using an emotion lexicon and lexical patterns. We then decompose the emotion classification task into two sub-steps: sentiment polarity classification (coarsegrained emotion classification), and emotion classification (fine-grained emotion classification). For each subtask, the collection of emotion-proviking event instances is used as labelled examples to train a classifier. The results of our experiments indicate that our method significantly outperforms the baseline method. We also find that compared with the single-step model, which applies the emotion classifier directly to inputs, our two-step model significantly reduces sentiment polarity errors, which are considered fatal errors in real dialog applications. © 2008. Licensed under the Creative Commons.