Root-Word Analysis of Turkish Emotional Language

This paper describes a model for the perceived emotion of Turkish sentences based on the emotions associated with the constituent words. In our model, each emotion is mapped to a point in the continuous space defined by three emotional attributes: valence, activation, and dominance. We collected a large data set through two independent surveys: a word-level survey that prompted users with emotional words and asked them to assign each word a continuous emotional interval, and a sentence-level survey that prompted users with emotional sentences collected from 31 children’s books and asked them to rate each sentence on a discrete emotional scale. The word-level survey was aimed at creating a core affective lexicon for Turkish. It is difficult to build a comprehensive affective lexicon for Turkish due to its very productive morphology that generates a very large vocabulary. We deal with the sparsity issues caused by the large word vocabulary by analyzing the emotional content of word roots. Our experimental results indicate that there is a strong correlation between the emotions attributed to Turkish word roots and the Turkish sentences.