Emotion analysis in blogs at sentence level using a Chinese emotion corpus

Abstract

Previous researches for emotional analysis of texts have included a variety of text contents: weblogs, stories, news, text messages, spoken dialogs, and so on. Compared with other text styles, the main characteristics of emotional expressions in blogs are as follows: (1) Highly personal, subjective writing style; (2) New words and expressions are constantly emerging; (3) The integrity and continuity of using language. Using a Chinese emotion corpus (Ren-CECps), in this study, we make an analysis on emotion expressions in blogs at sentence level. Firstly, we separate the sentences into two classes: simple sentences (sentences without negative words, conjunctions, or question mark) and complex sentences (sentences with negative words, conjunctions, or question mark). Then we compare the two classes of sentence on sentence emotion recognition based on emotional words. Furthermore we analysis the following factors for emotion change at sentence level: negative words, conjunctions, punctuation marks, and contextual emotions. At last, we make an hypothesis that the emotional focus of a sentence could be expressed by a certain clause in this sentence, and the experimental results have proved this hypothesis, which showed that selecting the clauses containing emotional focus of a sentence correctly would be helpful to recognize sentence emotions.