Multilingual Affect Polarity and Valence Prediction in Metaphor-Rich Texts

Metaphor is an important way of conveying the affect of people, hence understanding how people use metaphors to convey affect is important for the communication between individuals and increases cohesion if the perceived affect of the concrete example is the same for the two individuals. Therefore, building computational models that can automatically identify the affect in metaphor-rich texts like “The team captain is a rock.”, “Time is money.”, “My lawyer is a shark.” is an important challenging problem, which has been of great interest to the research community. To solve this task, we have collected and manually annotated the affect of metaphor-rich texts for four languages. We present novel algorithms that integrate triggers for cognitive, affective, perceptual and social processes with stylistic and lexical information. By running evaluations on datasets in English, Spanish, Russian and Farsi, we show that the developed affect polarity and valence prediction technology of metaphor-rich texts is portable and works equally well for different languages.