Chinese EmoBank: Building Valence-Arousal Resources for Dimensional Sentiment Analysis

An increasing amount of research has recently focused on dimensional sentiment analysis that represents affective states as continuous numerical values on multiple dimensions, such as valence-arousal (VA) space. Compared to the categorical approach that represents affective states as distinct classes (e.g., positive and negative), the dimensional approach can provide more fine-grained (real-valued) sentiment analysis. However, dimensional sentiment resources with valence-arousal ratings are very rare, especially for the Chinese language. Therefore, this study aims to: (1) Build a Chinese valence-arousal resource called Chinese EmoBank, the first Chinese dimensional sentiment resource featuring various levels of text granularity including 5,512 single words, 2,998 multi-word phrases, 2,582 single sentences, and 2,969 multi-sentence texts. The valence-arousal ratings are annotated by crowdsourcing based on the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) rating scale. A corpus cleanup procedure is then performed to improve annotation quality by removing outlier ratings and improper texts. (2) Evaluate the proposed resource using different categories of classifiers such as lexicon-based, regression-based, and neural-network-based methods, and comparing their performance to a similar evaluation of an English dimensional sentiment resource.