Extracting Causes of Emotions from Text

This paper focuses on the novel task of automatic extraction of phrases related to causes of emotions. The analysis of emotional causes in sentences, where emotions are explicitly indicated through emotion keywords can provide the foundation for research on challenging task of recognition of implicit affect from text. We developed a corpus of emotion causes specific for 22 emotions. Based on the analysis of this corpus we introduce a method for the detection of the linguistic relations between an emotion and its cause and the extraction of the phrases describing the emotion causes. The method employs syntactic and dependency parser and rules for the analysis of eight types of the emotion-cause linguistic relations. The results of evaluation showed that our method performed with high level of accuracy (82%).