Lexicons for Sentiment, Affect, and Connotation

Introduction

1. What does “affective” mean in NLP, following affective computing?
   Emotion, sentiment, personality, mood and attitudes. Closely related is subjectivity: the study of a speaker’s or writer’s evaluations, opinions, emotions and speculations.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 23, Introduction, p. 519
2. What are the five classes of affective states in Scherer’s typology?

   state	gist	examples
   emotion	brief response to a significant event	angry, joyful, proud
   mood	diffuse, low intensity, long, often without cause	cheerful, gloomy
   interpersonal stance	stance toward another person in an interaction	cold, warm, friendly
   attitude	enduring affectively colored beliefs and preferences	liking, hating
   personality trait	stable dispositions typical for a person	nervous, reckless

   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 23, Introduction, p. 519
3. In Scherer’s typology, what does sentiment analysis extract?
   Attitudes: what people like or dislike, e.g. from reviews, editorials or tweets.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 23, Introduction, p. 519
4. Give uses for detecting emotions, moods, interpersonal stance and personality.
   Emotion/mood: a confused or engaged student in a tutoring system, a frustrated caller, signs of depression. Stance: friendliness or awkwardness, conversational hot spots for meeting summarization. Personality: conversational agents work better when they match users’ personality expectations.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 23, Introduction, pp. 519–520
5. What are affective (sentiment) lexicons, and what do they presuppose?
   Lists of words carrying strong cues to affect or sentiment, used instead of all words as features. They presuppose that words have connotations: aspects of meaning related to a writer’s or reader’s emotions, sentiment, opinions or evaluations.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 23, Introduction, p. 520