The classification of implicit emotions in text has always been a great challenge to emotion processing. Even though the majority of emotion expressed implicitly, most previous attempts at emotions have focused on the examination of explicit emotions. The poor performance of existing emotion identification and classification models can partly be attributed to the disregard of implicit emotions. In view of this, this paper presents the development of a Chinese event-comment social media emotion corpus. The corpus deals with both explicit and implicit emotions with more emphasis being placed on the implicit ones. This paper specifically describes the data collection and annotation of the corpus. An annotation scheme has been proposed for the annotation of emotion-related information including the emotion type, the emotion cause, the emotion reaction, the use of rhetorical question, the opinion target (i.e. the semantic role in an event that triggers an emotion), etc. Corpus data shows that the annotated items are of great value to the identification of implicit emotions. We believe that the corpus will be a useful resource for both explicit and implicit emotion classification and detection as well as event classification.

Emotion processing has always been a great challenge. Given the fact that an emotion is triggered by cause events and that cause events are an integral part of emotion, this paper constructs a Chinese emotion cause corpus as a first step towards automatic inference of cause-emotion correlation. The corpus focuses on five primary emotions, namely happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and surprise. It is annotated with emotion cause events based on our proposed annotation scheme. Corpus data shows that most emotions are expressed with causes, and that causes mostly occur before the corresponding emotion verbs. We also examine the correlations between emotions and cause events in terms of linguistic cues: causative verbs, perception verbs, epistemic markers, conjunctions, prepositions, and others. Results show that each group of linguistic cues serves as an indicator marking the cause events in different structures of emotional constructions. We believe that the emotion cause corpus will be the useful resource for automatic emotion cause detection as well as emotion detection and classification.