Encoding emotion in Chinese : a database of Chinese emotion words with information of emotion type, intensity, and valence

Abstract

Despite the increasing interest in emotion and sentiment analysis in Chinese text, the field lacks reliable, normative ratings of the emotional content and valence of Chinese emotion words. This paper reports the first large-scale survey of average language users’ judgment of perceived emotion type (e.g., anger, happiness), emotional intensity, and valence (e.g., positive, negative) of Chinese emotion words. The results of the survey reveal significant differences from previously proposed Chinese emotion lexicons, which mostly relied on a few researchers’ judgment or automatic annotation. Furthermore, the current study also explores the issue of lexical variation across different Chinese varieties with a comparison of emotion word perception by Chinese speakers from three different areas (Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Singapore). The emotion lexicons constructed in the current study will serve as an important reference for future research on emotion and language, including (but not limited to) topics related to sentiment detection and analysis, perception of affective language, and cross-regional lexical and semantic variation in Chinese.