Predicting Social Emotions from Readers’ Perspective

Abstract

Due to the rapid development of Web, large numbers of documents assigned by readers’ emotions have been generated through new portals. Comparing to the previous studies which focused on author s perspective, our research focuses on readers’ emotions invoked by news articles. Our research provides meaningful assistance in social media application such as sentiment retrieval, opinion summarization and election prediction. In this paper, we predict the readers’ emotion of news based on the social opinion network. More specifically, we construct the opinion network based on the semantic distance. The communities in the news network indicate specific events which are related to the emotions. Therefore, the opinion network serves as the lexicon between events and corresponding emotions. We leverage neighbor relationship in network to predict readers’ emotions. As a result, our methods obtain better result than the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we developed a growing strategy to prune the network for practical application. The experiment verifies the rationality of the reduction for application.