The language of emotion in short blog texts

Emotion is central to human interactions, and automatic detection could enhance our experience with technologies. We investigate the linguistic expression of fine-grained emotion in 50 and 200 word samples of real blog texts previously coded by expert and naive raters. Content analysis (LIWC) reveals angry authors use more affective language and negative affect words, and that joyful authors use more positive affect words. Additionally, a cooccurrence semantic space approach (LSA) was able to identify fear (which naive human emotion raters could not do). We relate our findings to human emotion perception and note potential computational applications. Author Keywords Blogs, language, text analysis, emotion, affect. ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m [Information Interfaces and Presentation (HCI)]: Miscellaneous. J4 [Social and behavioral systems]: Psychology.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CSCW
• Authors: Alastair J. Gill, Robert M. French, Darren Gergle, Jon Oberlander
• Keywords: CSCW 2008, Emotion, Human Emotion, Human Emotion Raters, Social Sciences