Affective topic model for social emotion detection

The rapid development of social media services has been a great boon for the communication of emotions through blogs, microblogs/tweets, instant-messaging tools, news portals, and so forth. This paper is concerned with the detection of emotions evoked in a reader by social media. Compared to classical sentiment analysis conducted from the writer’s perspective, analysis from the reader’s perspective can be more meaningful when applied to social media. We propose an affective topic model with the intention to bridge the gap between social media materials and a reader’s emotions by introducing an intermediate layer. The proposed model can be used to classify the social emotions of unlabeled documents and to generate a social emotion lexicon. Extensive evaluations using real-world data validate the effectiveness of the proposed model for both these applications.