Emotion Detection and Analysis on Social Media

TL;DR

This paper presents a combined NLP and machine learning approach for detecting and classifying six basic emotions in social media text, automating training data creation and achieving high accuracy on Twitter data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel hybrid method for emotion detection that automates training data generation and enhances classification accuracy in social media texts.

Findings

Effective classification of emotions in Twitter data

Automated training set creation reduces manual effort

High accuracy achieved in emotion detection

Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of detection, classification and quantification of emotions of text in any form. We consider English text collected from social media like Twitter, which can provide information having utility in a variety of ways, especially opinion mining. Social media like Twitter and Facebook is full of emotions, feelings and opinions of people all over the world. However, analyzing and classifying text on the basis of emotions is a big challenge and can be considered as an advanced form of Sentiment Analysis. This paper proposes a method to classify text into six different Emotion-Categories: Happiness, Sadness, Fear, Anger, Surprise and Disgust. In our model, we use two different approaches and combine them to effectively extract these emotions from text. The first approach is based on Natural Language Processing, and uses several textual features like emoticons, degree words and negations, Parts Of Speech and other grammatical analysis. The second approach is based on Machine Learning classification algorithms. We have also successfully devised a method to automate the creation of the training-set itself, so as to eliminate the need of manual annotation of large datasets. Moreover, we have managed to create a large bag of emotional words, along with their emotion-intensities. On testing, it is shown that our model provides significant accuracy in classifying tweets taken from Twitter.