Emotions from Text: Machine Learning for Text-based Emotion Prediction

Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm, Dan Roth, Richard Sproat

Abstract: In addition to information, text contains attitudinal, and more specifically, emotional content. This paper explores the text-based emotion prediction problem empirically, using supervised machine learning with the SNoW learning architecture. The goal is to classify the emotional affinity of sentences in the narrative domain of children's fairy tales, for subsequent usage in appropriate expressive rendering of text-to-speech synthesis. Initial experiments on a preliminary data set of 22 fairy tales show encouraging results over a naive baseline and BOW approach for classification of emotional versus non-emotional contents, with some dependency on parameter tuning. We also discuss results for a tripartite model which covers emotional valence, as well as feature set alternations. In addition, we present plans for a more cognitively sound sequential model, taking into consideration a larger set of basic emotions.