Towards the improvement of automatic emotion pre-annotation with polarity and subjective information

Abstract

Emotion detection has a high potential positive impact on the benefit of business, society, politics or education. Given this, the main objective of our research is to contribute to the resolution of one of the most important challenges in textual emotion detection: emotional corpora annotation. This will be tackled by proposing a semi-automatic methodology. It consists in two main phases: (1) an automatic process to pre-annotate the unlabelled sentences with a reduced number of emotional categories; and (2) a manual process of refinement where human annotators will determine which is the dominant emotion between the pre-defined set. Our objective in this paper is to show the pre-annotation process, as well as to evaluate the usability of subjective and polarity information in this process. The evaluation performed confirms clearly the benefits of employing the polarity and subjective information on emotion detection and thus endorses the relevance of our approach.