Applying multi-label techniques in emotion identification of short texts

Abstract

Abstract Sentiment Analysis is an emerging research field traditionally applied to classify opinions, sentiments and emotions towards polarity and subjectivity expressed in text. An important characteristic to automatic emotion analysis is the standpoint, in which we can look at an opinion from two perspectives, the opinion holder (author) who express an opinion, and the reader who reads and perceives the opinion. From the reader’s standpoint, the interpretations of the text can be multiple and depend on the personal background. The multiple standpoints cognition, in which readers can look at the same sentence, is an interesting scenario to use the multi-label classification paradigm in the Sentiment Analysis domain. This methodology is able to handle different target sentiments simultaneously in the same text, by also taking advantage of the relations between them. We applied different approaches such as algorithm adaptation, problem transformation and ensemble methods in order to explore the wide range of multi-label solutions. The experiments were conducted on 10,080 news sentences from two different real datasets. Experimental results showed that the Ensemble Classifier Chain overcame the other algorithms, average F-measure of 64.89% using emotion strength features, when considering six emotions and neutral sentiment.