Emotion Analysis on Twitter: The Hidden Challenge

In this paper, we present an experiment to detect emotions in tweets. Unlike much previous research, we draw the important distinction between the tasks of emotion detection in a closed world assumption (i.e. every tweet is emotional) and the complicated task of identifying emotional versus non-emotional tweets. Given an apparent lack of appropriately annotated data, we created two corpora for these tasks. We describe two systems, one symbolic and one based on machine learning, which we evaluated on our datasets. Our evaluation shows that a machine learning classifier performs best on emotion detection, while a symbolic approach is better for identifying relevant (i.e. emotional) tweets.