Abstract

This paper presents a novel way for assessing the affective qualities of natural language and a scenario for its use. Previous approaches to textual affect sensing have employed keyword spotting, lexical affinity, statistical methods, and hand-crafted models. This paper demonstrates a new approach, using large-scale real-world knowledge about the inherent affective nature of everyday situations (such as "getting into a car accident") to classify sentences into "basic" emotion categories. This commonsense approach has new robustness implications.

Citations