Encoding emotion in Chinese: a database of Chinese emotion words with information of emotion type, intensity, and valence

Abstract

Despite the increasing interest in emotion and sentiment analysis in Chinese text, the field lacks reliable, normative ratings of the emotional content and valence of Chinese emotion words. This paper reports the first large-scale survey of average language users' judgment of perceived emotion type (e.g., ANGER, HAPPINESS), emotional intensity, and valence (e.g., POSITIVE, NEGATIVE) of Chinese emotion words. The results of the survey reveal significant differences from previously proposed Chinese emotion lexicons, which mostly relied on a few researchers' judgment or automatic annotation. Furthermore, the current study also explores the issue of lexical variation across different Chinese varieties with a comparison of emotion word perception by Chinese speakers from three different areas (Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Singapore). The emotion lexicons constructed in the current study will serve as an important reference for future research on emotion and language, including (but not limited to) topics related to sentiment detection and analysis, perception of affective language, and cross-regional lexical and semantic variation in Chinese.

Love me in L1, but hate me in L2: How native speakers and bilinguals rate the affectivity of words when feeling or thinking about them

“…The emotional (positive and negative) words and neutral words included in previous research on this area have been commonly selected from normative studies, where native speakers rate a large set of words in terms of their affective properties, most often valence and arousal. Subjective norms are available for a variety of languages, such as English (e.g., Warriner, Kuperman & Brysbaert, 2013); Spanish (e.g., Guasch, Ferré & Fraga, 2016; Stadthagen-Gonzalez, Imbault, Perez Sanchez & Brysbaert, 2016); European Portuguese -EP- (e.g., Soares, Comesaña, Pinheiro, Simões & Frade, 2012); French (e.g., Monnier & Syssau, 2014); German (e.g., Võ, Conrad, Kuchinke, Urton, Hofmann & Jacobs, 2009); Polish (e.g., Imbir, 2015); Croatian (e.g., Ćoso, Guasch, Ferré & Hinojosa, 2019); Finnish (e.g., Eilola & Havelka, 2010); Italian (e.g., Montefinese, Ambrosini, Fairfield & Mammarella, 2014); Dutch (e.g., Moors, De Houwer, Hermans, Wanmaker, Van Schie, Van Harmelen, De Schryver, De Winne & Brysbaert, 2013); or Chinese (e.g., Lin & Yao, 2016). When bilingual experiments are designed, those words are commonly translated to the other language involved in the study and their valence and arousal levels are assumed to be the same in both languages.…”

Social and emotion dimensional organizations in the abstract semantic space: the neuropsychological evidence

“…The mean hedonic valence (distance from neutrality point, 4) ratings for each category were: S−E−, 0.28 (± 0.11, range = 0.15–0.50); S+E−, 0.32 (± 0.16, range = 0.07–0.55); S+E+, 1.60 (± 0.39, range = 0.93–2.07); Emo/S−E+, 1.72 (± 0.28, range = 1.40–2.15). Emo/S−E+ words were further referenced to Chinese emotional state word databases 67 , 68 , with the majority (33 out of 39) being eligible. Words in one category never appeared in other categories.…”

Chinese American Immigrant Parents' Socialization of Emotions in Bilingual Bicultural Preschool Children

“…. " This definition for emotion words is based on the framework developed by Pavlenko (2008) and is consistent with the coding criteria used in other studies that examined Chinese emotion words (i.e., Lin and Yao, 2016;Ng et al, 2019). A trained native Cantonese-speaking research assistant coded the emotion words.…”