Use of Word Clustering to Improve Emotion Recognition from Short Text

Abstract

Emotion recognition is an important component of affective computing, and is significant in the implementation of natural and friendly human-computer interaction. An effective approach to recognizing emotion from text is based on a machine learning technique, which deals with emotion recognition as a classification problem. However, in emotion recognition, the texts involved are usually very short, leaving a very large, sparse feature space, which decreases the performance of emotion classification. This paper proposes to resolve the problem of feature sparseness, and largely improve the emotion recognition performance from short texts by doing the following: representing short texts with word cluster features, offering a novel word clustering algorithm, and using a new feature weighting scheme. Emotion classification experiments were performed with different features and weighting schemes on a publicly available dataset. The experimental results suggest that the word cluster features and the proposed weighting scheme can partly resolve problems with feature sparseness and emotion recognition performance.