Emotions Evoked by Common Words and Phrases: Using Mechanical Turk to Create an Emotion Lexicon

Abstract

Even though considerable attention has been given to semantic orientation of words and the creation of large polarity lexicons, research in emotion analysis has had to rely on limited and small emotion lexicons. In this paper, we show how we create a high-quality, moderate-sized emotion lexicon using Mechanical Turk. In addition to questions about emotions evoked by terms, we show how the inclusion of a word choice question can discourage malicious data entry, help identify instances where the annotator may not be familiar with the target term (allowing us to reject such annotations), and help obtain annotations at sense level (rather than at word level). We perform an extensive analysis of the annotations to better understand the distribution of emotions evoked by terms of different parts of speech. We identify which emotions tend to be evoked simultaneously by the same term and show that certain emotions indeed go hand in hand. 1