Computational Event Evaluation based on Appraisal Theories for Emotion Analysis

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Roman Klinger
• Subject Area: Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing ; General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 380093645

Emotion analysis in natural language processings aims at associating text with emotions, for instance with anger, fear, joy, surprise, disgust or sadness. This task extends sentiment analysis, which adds further qualitative value in applications, for instance in social media analysis, in the analysis of fictional stories or news articles.Existing research has so far mainly focused on the association of text with specific emotion models from psychological research. The development of methods for detecting phrases in text which denote the emotion experiencer (the character or person who feels the emotion), the emotion theme (the cause of the development of an emotion) as well as the modifiers of an emotion (intensifiers and diminishers) has been neglected.In this project, we aim at filling this gap. We will develop manually annotated corpora from different domains (news, novels, social media) in German and English. Based on these resources, we develop models which are able to automatically recognize and extract such information. We work on different levels: Firstly, we connect words with emotions (with distributional and lexical methods), including grammatical variants. Then, secondly, we analyze these mentions in context with modifiers, the feeler and the theme (cause) of the emotion. Thirdly, we model these information in context, i.e., beyond seperated mentions. All methods will be analyzed regarding their domain and language independence.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants