Words often convey affect---emotions, feelings, and attitudes. Further, different words can convey affect to various degrees (intensities). However, existing manually created lexicons for basic emotions (such as anger and fear) indicate only coarse categories of affect association (for example, associated with anger or not associated with anger). Automatic lexicons of affect provide fine degrees of association, but they tend not to be accurate as human-created lexicons. Here, for the first time, we present a manually created affect intensity lexicon with real-valued scores of intensity for four basic emotions: anger, fear, joy, and sadness. (We will subsequently add entries for more emotions such as disgust, anticipation, trust, and surprise.) We refer to this dataset as the {\it NRC Affect Intensity Lexicon}, or {\it AIL} for short. AIL has entries for close to 6,000 English words. We used a technique called best--worst scaling (BWS) to create the lexicon. BWS improves annotation consistency and obtains reliable fine-grained scores (split-half reliability $> 0.91$). We also compare the entries in AIL with the entries in the {\it NRC VAD Lexicon}, which has valence, arousal, and dominance (VAD) scores for 20K English words. We find that anger, fear, and sadness words, on average, have very similar VAD scores. However, sadness words tend to have slightly lower dominance scores than fear and anger words. The Affect Intensity Lexicon has applications in automatic emotion analysis in a number of domains such as commerce, education, intelligence, and public health. AIL is also useful in the building of natural language generation systems.
@InProceedings{MOHAMMAD18.329, author = {Saif Mohammad}, title = "{Word Affect Intensities}", booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {May 7-12, 2018}, address = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference chair) and Khalid Choukri and Christopher Cieri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Koiti Hasida and Hitoshi Isahara and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Hélène Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis and Takenobu Tokunaga}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {979-10-95546-00-9}, language = {english} }
Summary of the paper