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the record · 2003 · sentiment analysis

A model of textual affect sensing using real-world knowledge

Hugo Liu, Henry Lieberman & Ted Selker (2003). Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI 2003), 125–132, ACM Press.

795 citationsACM IUI Impact Award (2018)
PDFDOI

A sentence such as “I got fired” carries feeling without naming one. This paper uses everyday knowledge to infer that implicit affect. It filters affective statements from Open Mind Common Sense, grounds them in six Ekman emotions, and combines four models of event structure, concepts, valence, and modifiers. Smoothing represents emotional decay, local interpolation, overall mood, and transitions such as relief. EmpathyBuddy made the result visible as a reacting face beside an email composer. In a twenty-person interface study, the real affect model was judged more intelligent and drew the strongest interest in continued use; randomized faces were slightly more entertaining. The study did not measure classifier precision or recall, and the paper leaves sarcasm, humor, personal history, and long narrative context unresolved. It received Best Paper at ACM IUI in 2003; in 2018 the same conference gave the same work its Impact Award.

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