Computing Affect in Metaphors

This article describes a novel approach to automated determination of affect associated with metaphorical language. Affect in language is understood to mean the attitude toward a topic that a writer attempts to convey to the reader by using a particular metaphor. This affect, which we will classify as positive, negative or neutral with various degrees of intensity, may arise from the target of the metaphor, from the choice of words used to describe it, or from other elements in its immediate linguistic context. We attempt to capture all these contributing elements in an Affect Calculus and demonstrate experimentally that the resulting method can accurately approximate human judgment. The work reported here is part of a larger effort to develop a highly accurate system for identifying, classifying, and comparing metaphors occurring in large volumes of text across four different languages: English, Spanish, Russian, and Farsi.