Predicting Emotional Word Ratings using Distributional Representations and Signed Clustering

João Sedoc, Daniel Preoţiuc-Pietro, Lyle Ungar


Abstract
Inferring the emotional content of words is important for text-based sentiment analysis, dialogue systems and psycholinguistics, but word ratings are expensive to collect at scale and across languages or domains. We develop a method that automatically extends word-level ratings to unrated words using signed clustering of vector space word representations along with affect ratings. We use our method to determine a word’s valence and arousal, which determine its position on the circumplex model of affect, the most popular dimensional model of emotion. Our method achieves superior out-of-sample word rating prediction on both affective dimensions across three different languages when compared to state-of-the-art word similarity based methods. Our method can assist building word ratings for new languages and improve downstream tasks such as sentiment analysis and emotion detection.
Anthology ID:
E17-2090
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers
Month:
April
Year:
2017
Address:
Valencia, Spain
Editors:
Mirella Lapata, Phil Blunsom, Alexander Koller
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
564–571
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/E17-2090
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
João Sedoc, Daniel Preoţiuc-Pietro, and Lyle Ungar. 2017. Predicting Emotional Word Ratings using Distributional Representations and Signed Clustering. In Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers, pages 564–571, Valencia, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Predicting Emotional Word Ratings using Distributional Representations and Signed Clustering (Sedoc et al., EACL 2017)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/E17-2090.pdf