Microblog Sentiment Analysis with Emoticon Space Model

Emoticons have been widely employed to express different types of moods, emotions, and feelings in microblog environments. They are therefore regarded as one of the most important signals for microblog sentiment analysis. Most existing studies use several emoticons that convey clear emotional meanings as noisy sentiment labels or similar sentiment indicators. However, in practical microblog environments, tens or even hundreds of emoticons are frequently adopted and all emoticons have their own unique emotional meanings. Besides, a considerable number of emoticons do not have clear emotional meanings. An improved sentiment analysis model should not overlook these phenomena. Instead of manually assigning sentiment labels to several emoticons that convey relatively clear meanings, we propose the emoticon space model (ESM) that leverages more emoticons to construct word representations from a massive amount of unlabeled data. By projecting words and microblog posts into an emoticon space, the proposed model helps identify subjectivity, polarity, and emotion in microblog environments. The experimental results for a public microblog benchmark corpus (NLP&CC 2013) indicate that ESM effectively leverages emoticon signals and outperforms previous state-of-the-art strategies and benchmark best runs.