Abstract
Automated sentiment extraction from social media is enabling technology to support gathering online customer insights. The basic sentiment extraction is semantic classification of a text unit as positive or negative using lexical and/or contextual clues in a natural language system. From the input side, it is observed that social media as a sub-language often uses emoticons mixed with text to show emotions. Most emoticons, e.g. :=), are not natural language words, but textual symbols using characters to present a smiley face. Intuitively, such symbols are innately associated with emotions, whether happy, annoyed or don’t care, hence important clues for helping sentiment classification. Previous research has involved the limited use of emoticons as noisy labels in sentiment learning but detailed study on how noisy or useful they are has not been done. This paper presents a comprehensive data analysis study of the role of emoticons in sentence level sentiment classification. Various investigations are conducted on a fairly large annotated social media corpus, selected by our consumer insight analytics system. This corpus consists of 40,548 sentiment-rich sentences which business users are truly interested in mining. The study shows that the consistency between positive/negative emoticons with human judgment in this corpus is as high as 75.2%. Another larger randomly selected corpus consisting of 300,000 sentences from social media shows its consistency with human judgment to be 40.1%. A further study finds that emoticons’ recall contribution to sentiment classification is moderate, nevertheless, the data containing emoticons and brands are guaranteed to be quality social media representing customers’ voice instead of businesses’ voice such as press news. In addition, emoticon is an additional factor to help extract sentiments where other linguistic clues are insufficient.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Davidov, D., Tsur, O., Rappoport, A.: Enhanced sentiment learning using twitter hashtags and smileys. In: Proceedings of COLING 2010: Poster Volume, Beijing, pp. 241–249 (2010)
Hogenboom, A., Bal, D., Frasincar, F., Bal, M., Jong, F., Kaymak, U.: Exploiting Emoticons in Sentiment Analysis. In: Proceedings of the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, pp. 703–710 (2013)
Liu, K., Li, W., Guo, M.: Emoticon Smoothed Language Models for Twitter Sentiment Analysis. In: Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2012)
Pang, B., Lee, L.: Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis. Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval 2(1), 1–135 (2008)
Ptaszynski,M., Rzepka, R., Araki, K.,Momouchi, Y.: Research on Emoticons: Review of the Field and Proposal of Research Framework.言語処理学会 第 17 回年次大会 発表論文集 (2011)
Read, J.: Using Emoticons to reduce Dependency in Machine Learning Techniques for Sentiment Classification. In: Proceedings of the ACL Student Research Workshop, pp. 43–48 (2005)
Strapparava, C., Mihalcea, R.: Learning to identify emotions in text. In: SAC (2008)
Zhao, J., Dong, L., Wu, J., Xu, K.: MoodLens: an emoticon-based sentiment analysis system for Chinese tweets. In: KDD 2012, pp. 1528–1531 (2012)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Min, M., Lee, T., Hsu, R. (2013). Role of Emoticons in Sentence-Level Sentiment Classification. In: Sun, M., Zhang, M., Lin, D., Wang, H. (eds) Chinese Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing Based on Naturally Annotated Big Data. NLP-NABD CCL 2013 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8202. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41491-6_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41491-6_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-41490-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-41491-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)