Abstract
Despite the increasing interest in emotion and sentiment analysis in Chinese text, the field lacks reliable, normative ratings of the emotional content and valence of Chinese emotion words. This paper reports the first large-scale survey of average language users’ judgment of perceived emotion type (e.g., anger, happiness), emotional intensity, and valence (e.g., positive, negative) of Chinese emotion words. The results of the survey reveal significant differences from previously proposed Chinese emotion lexicons, which mostly relied on a few researchers’ judgment or automatic annotation. Furthermore, the current study also explores the issue of lexical variation across different Chinese varieties with a comparison of emotion word perception by Chinese speakers from three different areas (Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Singapore). The emotion lexicons constructed in the current study will serve as an important reference for future research on emotion and language, including (but not limited to) topics related to sentiment detection and analysis, perception of affective language, and cross-regional lexical and semantic variation in Chinese.
Highlights
A fundamental element of humanity, emotion plays a vital role in human societies of all times, geographical locations, and cultures
We propose two possible accounts for the observed pattern: first, the ambiguity in emotion type may interfere with the perception of emotion intensity, participants may find it difficult to evaluate emotion intensity for words belonging to multiple emotion categories; second, for some participants, the perception of emotion intensity may be conflated with emotion prototypicality, and BLENDED emotion words were perceived as less intensive than REPRESENTATIVE emotion words
Results of this study generated the first database of normative ratings of emotion type, emotion intensity, and valence for a list of Chinese emotion words, based on the judgment of Chinese speakers from Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Singapore
Summary
A fundamental element of humanity, emotion plays a vital role in human societies of all times, geographical locations, and cultures. The first line concerns the cognition and expression of emotion by humans, which has intrigued psychologists, cognitive scientists, and linguists for years (e.g., Desmet 2002; Frijda 1986, 1988, 1994, 2004; Kövecses 2000; Plutchik 1962, 1980, 1994; Russell 1980; Turner 1996, 2000, 2007; Wierzbicka 1992); the second line of research focuses on the automatic identification and classification of human emotion by machines (e.g., Ahmad 2011; Chuang and Wu 2002; Ortony et al 1988; Pang and Lee 2008; Ravi and Ravi 2015; Strapparava and Mihalcea 2008; Subasic and Huettner 2001; Tang et al 2009), which flourished in more recent years as a result of rising interest in artificial intelligence technologies. It is widely believed that there are some basic emotion types (e.g., HAPPINESS, ANGER, and SADNESS), and each emotion belongs to one or more basic typesb; on the other hand, emotions may differ in their intensity, for example, scared is a stronger emotion than afraid they both belong to the category of FEAR
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