Tracking Emotions of Bloggers: A Case Study for Bengali

Abstract

The present paper describes the identification and tracking of bloggers' emotions with respect to time from the structured Bengali blog documents. The assignment of Ekman's six basic emotions to the bloggers' comments is carried out at sentence and paragraph level granularities. The Referential Informative Chain (RIC) developed for each blogger consists of the nodes representing the emotional states of that blogger. Each node of a RIC contains the identification information of its associated blogger, timestamp, section and emotional sentences. The nodes are arranged in each RIC based on the ascending order of the associated timestamps. An affect scoring technique has been employed to capture the emotions from each of the nodes of a blogger's RIC. The incorporation of self emotions and influential emotions as extracted from other bloggers plays a significant role in detecting the emotions of a blogger's present state. The Extrinsic evaluation produces precision (P), recall (R) and F-Measure of 61.05%, 69.81% and 65.13% respectively for evaluating the total of 193 emotional states of 20 bloggers. The Intrinsic evaluation has been conducted using a manual rater with the help of a statistical agreement coefficient, Krippendorff s alpha a. Two types of alpha, namely nominal alpha and interval alpha produce the average scores of 0.67 and 0.72, respectively.