Five-Dimensional Sentiment Analysis of Corpora, Documents and Words

Abstract

Sentiment analysis has become a widely used approach to assess the emotional content of written documents such as customer feedback. In positive psychology research, the typical one-dimensional analysis framework has been extended to include five dimensions. This five-dimensional model, PERMA, enables a fine-grained analysis of written texts. We propose an approach in which this model, statistical analysis and the self-organizing map are used. We analyze corpora from various genres. A hybrid methodology that uses the self-organizing maps algorithm and human judgment is suggested for expanding the PERMA lexicon. This vocabulary expansion can be useful for English but it is potentially even more crucial in the case of other languages for which the lexicon is not readily available. The challenges and solutions related to the text mining of texts written in a morphologically complex language such as Finnish are also considered. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.