Seeing Stars of Valence and Arousal in Blog Posts

Abstract

Sentiment analysis is a growing field of research, driven by both commercial applications and academic interest. In this paper, we explore multiclass classification of diary-like blog posts for the sentiment dimensions of valence and arousal, where the aim of the task is to predict the level of valence and arousal of a post on a ordinal five-level scale, from very negative/low to very positive/high, respectively. We show how to map discrete affective states into ordinal scales in these two dimensions, based on the psychological model of Russell's circumplex model of affect and label a previously available corpus with multidimensional, real-valued annotations. Experimental results using regression and one-versus-all approaches of support vector machine classifiers show that although the latter approach provides better exact ordinal class prediction accuracy, regression techniques tend to make smaller scale errors.