Automatic Expansion of Domain-Specific Affective Models for Web Intelligence Applications

Background. Sentic computing relies on welldefined affective models of different complexity - polarity to distinguish positive and negative sentiment,
for example, or more nuanced models to capture expressions of human emotions. When used to measure
communication success, even the most granular affective model combined with sophisticated machine learning approaches may not fully capture an organisation’s
strategic positioning goals. Such goals often deviate from
the assumptions of standardised affective models. While
certain emotions such as Joy and Trust typically represent desirable brand associations, specific communication goals formulated by marketing professionals often
go beyond such standard dimensions. For instance, the
brand manager of a television show may consider fear
or sadness to be desired emotions for its audience.
Method. This article introduces expansion techniques
for affective models, combining common and commonsense knowledge available in knowledge graphs with
language models and affective reasoning, improving coverage and consistency as well as supporting domainspecific interpretations of emotions.
Results and Conclusions. An extensive evaluation
compares the performance of different expansion techniques: (i) a quantitative evaluation based on the revisited Hourglass of Emotions model to assess perfor
mance on complex models that cover multiple affective categories, using manually compiled gold standard
data, and (ii) a qualitative evaluation of a domainspecific affective model for television programme brands.
The results of these evaluations demonstrate that the
introduced techniques support a variety of embeddings
and pre-trained models. The paper concludes with a
discussion on applying this approach to other scenarios
where affective model resources are scarce.