Development of Affective Lexicon for Spanish with Mexican Slang Expressions

Abstract

Nowadays exists a growing interest in the automatic extraction of subjective expressions (opinions, emotions and feelings) in texts. To identify the semantic orientation of a text, it is assumed that the occurrence of expressions that belong to some emotional category can be regarded as evidence that there is an affective state. Based on this assumption, we create an affective lexicon, consisting in the translation from English to Spanish of various lexical resources, including works based on psychological theories to identify words associated with emotions. The lexicon was manually enriched through semantic relationships as inclusion and synonymy using explanatory dictionaries. Expressions used in Mexican slang were also included in the lexicon. Every word in the lexicon was labeled with its semantic orientation; these are: “very positive”, “very negative”, “positive” or “negative”, for the translated words and “positive” or “negative” for the Mexican slang. The lexicon currently consists of 3550 words and 255 slang expressions.