Developing An Emotion Corpus

Sophia Lee, Hongzhi Xu and Chu-Ren HuangThe Hong Kong Polytechnic University

March 11, 2014VariAMU Workshop

IntroductionObjectiveEmotion as a pivot eventThe event-based emotion corpusOngoing work Conclusion

Outline

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Sentiment vs. Emotion

Emotions are universal human cognitive states elicited by actual or perceived external events

Emotions link cognitive experiences to potential consequences

E.g. unwanted circumstances anger aggressive behaviors

Introduction

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Emotions are treated as pivots linking reported events to potential actions by the experiencer

Emotion as a Pivot Event

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To construct a Chinese event-based corpus

To account for the linguistic correlations between pre-events and caused emotions, as well as the correlations between emotions and post-events

Objective

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9,000 instances of sentences are extracted from the Sinica Corpus based on the Chinese emotion keywords (Lee et al. 2010)

Each instance contains the focus sentence with the emotion keyword “<FocusSentence>”, plus the sentence before “<PrefixSentence>” and after “<SuffixSentence>”

The Event-based Corpus

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Sample instance

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For each annotated emotion, its pre-events and post-events are manually annotated.

A pre-event (cause event) refers to the event that triggers or is highly linked with the presence of the corresponding emotionsA post-event is an event triggered by the emotion, which shows a clear cause-effect relation

The events are usually linguistically expressed by means of verbs, nominalizations, and nominals.

Mark the shortest meaningful cause events that are closest to the emotion keywords.

Annotation Guidelines

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Annotation Tool

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Pre-events (81%) tend to occur more frequently than post-events (19%)

Pre-events (63%) tend to occur before the emotion keyword while post-events mostly occur after the emotion keyword (85%)

Pre-events can be verbal events or nominal events while post-events are all verbal events

Results (I)

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Pre-events tend to be introduced by a list of linguistics cues (Lee et al. 2012)

Prepositions, e.g. wei4 and dui4Conjunctions, e.g. yin1wei4 and yu2shi4Epistemic markers, e.g. kan4dao4 and ting1dao4

The types of post-events tend to have a close association with the emotion type

Result (II)

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To provide a deep linguistic analysis of the links between event structures and emotions

Temporal relations between events and emotions

To explore how the manual event-annotation and the linguistic analysis would help improve the automatic event and emotion identification

Identify events based on emotionsIdentify (implicit) emotions based on identified events

Ongoing work: Linguistic analysis

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To examine the temporal relation of the events involved in each emotion instance based on Allen’s Interval Algebra

Ongoing work: Temporal relation

For example,

is formalized as

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Emotions as pivots underlie our innovative approach towards a linguistic model for event and emotion identification.

The event-annotated emotion corpus and the analysis of emotion-event interaction offer rich structured data allowing the development of a theory of emotion as events.

Conclusion

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