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Weighting Assessment of the Effect of Chinese State-Changing Words on Emotions

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Abstract

Past studies of sentiment analysis have mainly applied algorithms based on vocabulary categories and emotional characteristics to detect the emotionality of text. However, the collocation of state-changing words and emotional vocabulary affects emotions. For example, adverbs of degree strengthen emotions, and negative adverbs reverse emotions. This study investigated the weighted effect of state-changing words on emotion. The research material comprised 73 state-changing words that were collocated with four emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, and anger. A total of 84 participants participated in the vocabulary assessment. The results revealed that state-changing words could be classified into four types: intensifying, weakening, neutralizing, and reversing. In a comparison of the weighting factors among emotions, the weighting effect of the same state-changing word in the positive emotion category was particularly evident. The results could serve as a reference for follow-up studies on detecting emotions in text.

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The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Funding

This work was financially supported by the grant MOST-111-2634-F-002-004 from Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of Taiwan, the MOST AI Biomedical Research Center, and the “Institute for Research Excellence in Learning Sciences” and “Chinese Language and Technology Center” of National Taiwan Normal University from The Featured Areas Research Center Program within the framework of the Higher Education Sprout Project by the Ministry of Education in Taiwan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Educational Psychology and Counseling, National Taiwan Normal University, Education College Building, Room 612, No. 162, Sec. 1, Heping E. Rd., Da-an District, Taipei City, 10610, Taiwan, ROC

    Chia-Yueh Chang, Meng-Ning Tsai, Yao-Ting Sung & Hsueh-Chih Chen

  2. Chinese Language and Technology Center, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC

    Yao-Ting Sung & Hsueh-Chih Chen

  3. Institute for Research Excellence in Learning Sciences, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC

    Yao-Ting Sung & Hsueh-Chih Chen

  4. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, ROC

    Yao-Ting Sung

  5. Graduate Institute of Information and Computer Education, National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC

    Yao-Ting Sung

  6. Department of Clinical Psychology, Fu-Jen Catholic University, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC

    Shu-Ling Cho

  7. NSTC AI Biomedical Research Center, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC

    Hsueh-Chih Chen

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Correspondence to Hsueh-Chih Chen.

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The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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The study was approved by the institutional review board of National Taiwan Normal University. All participants were informed of the procedures and gave their informed consent before the experiment began.

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Thank you for participating in this research. Next, you need to spend about 30 min to complete this questionnaire. During the research, please follow the instructions of the teacher and the instructions of the questionnaire, and complete the questionnaire according to the steps. The purpose of this study is to understand the impact of various state-changing words (such as degree words and negative words) on emotional states. Any information you fill in is not named and is only used for this study. The results of this study will be used as an academic reference, and the research materials are only for the use of relevant personnel in this study, and will not be outflowed. We will keep them confidential, please answer them with peace of mind. If you have any questions about the above research description, please ask the teacher. If there are no questions, please sign at the signature below and follow the instructions to start answering.

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Table 4 The four groups of state-changing words used in the cluster analysis
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4.

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Chang, CY., Tsai, MN., Sung, YT. et al. Weighting Assessment of the Effect of Chinese State-Changing Words on Emotions. J Psycholinguist Res 52, 2545–2566 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-023-09986-9

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