Predicting Valence-Arousal Ratings of Words Using a Weighted Graph Method

Compared to the categorical approach that represents affective states as several discrete classes (e.g., positive and negative), the dimensional approach represents affective states as continuous numerical values on multiple dimensions, such as the valence-arousal (VA) space, thus allowing for more fine-grained sentiment analysis. In building dimensional sentiment applications, affective lexicons with valence-arousal ratings are useful resources but are still very rare. Therefore, this study proposes a weighted graph model that considers both the relations of multiple nodes and their similarities as weights to automatically determine the VA ratings of affective words. Experiments on both English and Chinese affective lexicons show that the proposed method yielded a smaller error rate on VA prediction than the linear regression, kernel method, and pagerank algorithm used in previous studies.