Modeling the Impact of Modifiers on Emotional Statements

Humans use a variety of modifiers to enrich communications with one another. While this is a deliberate subtlety in our language, the presence of modifiers can cause problems for emotion analysis by machines. Our research objective is to understand and compare the influence of different modifiers on a wide range of emotion categories. We propose a novel data analysis method that not only quantifies how much emotional statements change under each modifier, but also models how emotions shift and how their confidence changes. This method is based on comparing the distributions of emotion labels for modified and non-modified occurrences of emotional terms within labeled data. We apply this analysis to study six types of modifiers (negation, intensification, conditionality, tense, interrogation, and modality) within a large corpus of tweets with emotional hashtags. Our study sheds light on how to model negation relations between given emotions, reveals the impact of previously under-studied modifiers, and suggests how to detect more precise emotional statements.