A Corpus-based Approach to Finding Happiness

Abstract

What are the sources of happiness and sadness in everyday life? In this paper, we employ ‘linguistic ethnography ’ to seek out where happiness lies in our everyday lives by considering a corpus of blogposts from the LiveJournal community annotated with happy and sad moods. By analyzing this corpus, we derive lists of happy and sad words and phrases annotated by their ‘happiness factor.’ Various semantic analyses performed with this wordlist reveal the happiness trajectory of a 24-day (3am and 9-10p are most happy), and a 7-day week (Wednesdays are saddest), and compare the socialness and humancenteredness of happy descriptions versus sad descriptions. We evaluate our corpus-based approach in a classification task and contrast our wordlist with emotionally-annotated