Semi-automatic Building Method for a Multidimensional Affect Dictionary for a New Language

Guillaume Pitel, Gregory Grefenstette


Abstract
Detecting the tone or emotive content of a text message is increasingly important in many natural language processing applications. While for the English language there exists a number of affect, emotive, opinion, or affect computer-usable lexicons for automatically processing text, other languages rarely possess these primary resources. Here we present a semi-automatic technique for quickly building a multidimensional affect lexicon for a new language. Most of the work consists of defining 44 paired affect directions (e.g. love-hate, courage-fear, etc.) and choosing a small number of seed words for each dimension. From this initial investment, we show how a first pass affect lexicon can be created for new language, using a SVM classifier trained on a feature space produced from Latent Semantic Analysis over a large corpus in the new language. We evaluate the accuracy of placing newly found emotive words in one or more of the defined semantic dimensions. We illustrate this technique by creating an affect lexicon for French, but the techniques can be applied to any language found on the Web and for which a large quantity of text exists.
Anthology ID:
L08-1158
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)
Month:
May
Year:
2008
Address:
Marrakech, Morocco
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/264_paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Guillaume Pitel and Gregory Grefenstette. 2008. Semi-automatic Building Method for a Multidimensional Affect Dictionary for a New Language. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08), Marrakech, Morocco. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Semi-automatic Building Method for a Multidimensional Affect Dictionary for a New Language (Pitel & Grefenstette, LREC 2008)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/264_paper.pdf