Acquiring Knowledge of Affective Events from Blogs Using Label Propagation

Abstract

Many common events in our daily life affect us in positive and negative ways. For example, going on vacation is typically an enjoyable event, while being rushed to the hospital is an undesirable event. In narrative stories and personal conversations, recognizing that some events have a strong affective polarity is essential to understand the discourse and the emotional states of the affected people. However, current NLP systems mainly depend on sentiment analysis tools, which fail to recognize many events that are implicitly affective based on human knowledge about the event itself and cultural norms. Our goal is to automatically acquire knowledge of stereotypically positive and negative events from personal blogs. Our research creates an event context graph from a large collection of blog posts and uses a sentiment classifier and semi-supervised label propagation algorithm to discover affective events. We explore several graph configurations that propagate affective polarity across edges using local context, discourse proximity, and event-event co-occurrence. We then harvest highly affective events from the graph and evaluate the agreement of the polarities with human judgements.