Impact
Some notable ways in which the NRC Emotion Lexicon has made impact include:
- First of its kind: It was the first word-emotion association lexicon, with entries for eight basic emotions as well as positive and negative sentiment. It still remains the largest such lexicon. Prior work largely focused on positive and negative sentiment. While earlier work focused on words that *denotate* emotion, this work included the larger set of words that are associated with or connotate an emotion.
- Quality Control: Careful attention was paid to ensure appropriate annotations including the use of a separate word choice question to make sure annotators knew the word and to guide them to the desired sense of the word for which annotations were solicited.
- Impact on NLP: The lexicon impacted work in sentiment and emotion analysis in NLP. Notably, facilitating work beyond just the positive-negative affect dimension. The lexicon has been used for word-, sentence-, tweet-, and document-level sentiment and emotion analysis, abusive language detection, personality trait identification, stance detection, etc. The lexicon is especially useful in unsupervised settings and when training data is limited or not available. However, even with the onset of deep learning methods, many top systems in shared tasks (such as SemEval-2018 Task 1 Affect in Tweets) continue to benefit from the lexicon by using it to initialize their embeddings and adding additional lexicon-derived features.
- Impact on fields beyond NLP:
- Work on Well-Being and Health Disorders: Used in work on understanding pandemic response, feelings towards influenza vaccinations, depression detection, hate speech detection, identifying cyber-bullying, etc. Proceedings of workshops such as CL-psych and i2b2 describe systems that use the NRC Emotion Lexicon.
- Psychology, Behavioural Science, Psycolinguistics, Fairness, and Social Science: Used in work on understanding how people express emotions, relationships between word characteristics (such as length and concreteness) with its associated emotion, gender attitudes, as well as the role of emotions in the spread of information, especially news, fake news, and viral videos. The highly cited paper "The spread of true and false news online" uses the lexicon to determine associations of emotions with fake news and its virality.
- Digital Humanities and Computational Literature (detecting narrative arcs in novels and fairy tales). Notable works include:
- Art:
- on creations such as the Wishing Wall, that that were displayed in:
- Barbican Centre, London, UK
- Tekniska Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (Oct 14 Aug 15)
- Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens (19th Oct15 10th Jan16)
- Zorlu Centre in Istanbul (16th Feb 12th June16)
- on work like generating music that captures the flow of emotions in novels; with some music eventually being played at the Louvre:
- TIME, May 7, 2014: This Is What Classic Novels Sound Like When a Computer Turns Them Into Piano Music.
- Human-Computer Interaction (virtual assistants, physiotherapy robots, etc.)
- Ethics and Fairness (work on comparing attitudes towards men and women at work)
- Data Science: see example data science projects highlighted in popular press (bottom of this page). Also see: Chatty maps. Fast Company, March 25, 2016: An Emotional Map Of The City, As Captured Through Its Sounds.
- Citations:
- Democratization of Emotion Analysis: The large lexicon allowed for the use of simple methods to track trends in emotions. This democratized emotion analysis and it was used not just by computer scientists, but also by journalists, psychologists, social scientists, and amateur data enthusiasts to detect trends in emotions in everything from the Brexit discourse, election tweets, Radiohead songs, abusive language, reddit posts, and more.
- Esquire, February 23, 2017. All Radiohead Songs Are Sad, but This Graph Shows Which Are the Saddest. The NRC Emotion Lexicon is used to compute the degree of sadness for Radiohead songs. Interactive Chart.
Also picked up in: A Journal of Musical Things, February 24, 2017. Science Discovers Which Radiohead Song is the Saddest; and A variation on the approach, February 28. Where I End and You Begin: Finding the Most Depressing Radiohead Songs using Crowd Data from SongMeanings.
- The Telegraph, June 15, 2016: EU referendum: Remain uses Project Fear more in tweets than Leave, analysis shows. [Use of the NRC Emotion Lexicon, aka EmoLex, to track sentiment in EU referendum tweets (Brexit).]
- The Crosstab, March 2, 2017. Trump's SOTU vs. the Past — Sentiment Analysis and Topic Modeling.
- Variance Explained, August 6, 2016. Text analysis of Trump's tweets confirms he writes only the (angrier) Android half. News also picked up by NPR, Los Angeles Times, Scientific American, The Verge, and others.
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Other Notable Press Coverage (of the lexicon and systems built using the lexicon over the years):
- Article in MIT Technology Review, September 5, 2013: How Mechanical Turkers Crowdsourced a Huge Lexicon of Links Between Words and Emotion. Also in its Spanish website and in crowdsourcing.org.
- TIME, August 14, 2013: Main Tweet: Researchers Dig Into The Intersection of Politics and Twitter.
- The New Scientist, September 27: What your email style says about your personality. Also in Times of India, MSN, Pharmacon, Galileo, Amic, and others.
- SlashDot, October 1, 2013: Text Analyzer Reveals Emotional 'Temperature' of Novels and Fairy Tales.
- The Physics ArXiv, October 1, 2013: Text Analyser Reveals Emotional Temperature of Novels and Fairy Tales. Also in EduBits.
- SlashDot, October 4, 2013: Data Mining Reveals the Emotional Differences In Emails From Men and Women.
- Singularity Hub, November 10, 2013:Algorithm Tracks Literary Emotion in Shakespeare, the Brothers Grimm.
- Glass Hammer, December 3, 2013: Are Your Emails Communicating a Lack of Confidence?
- Billboard, May 19, 2014. Computers, Classics and Cadenzas: Making Math Music From Literature. On our work on automatically generating music that captures the emotions in a novel.
- Washington Post, October 22, 2016. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton took to the debate stage and made sweet, sweet music.The article mentions NRC in relation to the lexicons we created, which were used to generate music from the Trump-Hillary debate text.
- Washington Post, August 12, 2016. Two people write Trump’s tweets. He writes the angrier ones.
- BGR, August 11, 2016. Donald Trump’s angriest tweets are sent from his Android while the nice ones are sent from an iPhone.
- NYC Data Science Academy, August 7, 2016. Twitter Analysis of Presidential Candidates 2016.
- April 13, 2017. Faster but less furious: why the Fast and Furious franchise is a box office goldmine. The NRC Emotion Lexicon is used to analyze the emotions in the Fast and Furious series movie scripts.
- January 24, 2018. An examination of the Twitter habits of Kentucky lawmakers. The NRC Emotion Lexicon is used to analyze the tweets of Democrats and Republicans.
- Technical.ly, February 1, 2018. Who’s the angriest character on ‘Seinfeld’? The NRC Emotion Lexicon is used to analyze the language of the characters in Seinfeld.
- SeekingAlpha, Apr. 30, 2018. A Sentiment Analysis Approach To Predicting Stock Returns. The NRC Emotion Lexicon is used to analyze 10-K reports of S&P 500 companies to predict future stock returns.
- InformationWeek, November 15, 2018. Decoding Programmers: How Emotions Can Change Code. Analyzing developer comments to show that their emotions impact their code.
- Psychology Today, December 27, 2018. Emotional Contagions Can Spread Like Wildfire Via YouTube. The NRC Emotion Lexicon is used to analyze the emotions in user comments on vlogs. Original Paper: Multilevel emotion transfer on YouTube: Disentangling the effects of emotional contagion and homophily on video audiences.
- Politico.mx, August 28, 2019. Enojo o sorpresa: emociones en Informes de López Portillo a Calderón. The NRC Emotion Lexicon is used to analyze the speeches of the Mexican President and other politicians.
- Tech Xplore, February 26, 2020. A language generation system that can compose creative poetry. The NRC Emotion Lexicon is used along with a deep learning system for automatic poetry generation. Original paper: Introducing Aspects of Creativity in Automatic Poetry Generation.
- AdNews, April 20, 2020. Coronavirus: Analysing stories from the Twitter frontline. Use of the NRC Emotion lexicon to Analyze emotions in tweets during the Covid-19 pandemic.
- Availability: The lexicon is made freely available for research, and has been commercially licensed to companies for a small fee.
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