EmoSenticSpace: A novel framework for affective common-sense reasoning

Emotions play a key role in natural language understanding and sensemaking. Pure machine learning usually fails to recognize and interpret emotions in text. The need for knowledge bases that give access to semantics and sentics (the conceptual and affective information) associated with natural language is growing exponentially in the context of big social data analysis. To this end, this paper proposes EmoSenticSpace, a new framework for affective common-sense reasoning that extends WordNet-Affect and SenticNet by providing both emotion labels and polarity scores for a large set of natural language concepts. The framework is built by means of fuzzy c-means clustering and support-vector-machine classification, and takes into account different similarity measures, such as point-wise mutual information and emotional affinity. EmoSenticSpace was tested on three emotion-related natural language processing tasks, namely sentiment analysis, emotion recognition, and personality detection. In all cases, the proposed framework outperforms the state of the art. In particular, the direct evaluation of EmoSenticSpace against the psychological features provided in the ISEAR dataset shows a 92.15% agreement. Keywords—Sentic computing, opinion mining, sentiment analysis, emotion detection, personality detection, fuzzy clustering.