Natural Language Engineering

Table of Contents - January 2012 - Volume 18, Issue 01  

Articles

A hierarchical approach to mood classification in blogs

FAZEL KESHTKARa1 and DIANA INKPENa1

a1 School of Information Technology and Engineering, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada e-mail: akeshta@site.uOttawa.ca, diana@site.uOttawa.ca

Abstract

In this article, we explore the task of mood classification for blog postings. We propose a novel approach that uses the hierarchy of possible moods to achieve better results than a standard machine learning approach. We also show that using sentiment orientation features improves the performance of classification. We used the Livejournal blog corpus as a data set to train and evaluate our method. We present extensive error analysis and discuss the difficulty of the task.

(Received September 09 2009)

(Revised April 22 2010)

(Accepted January 20 2011)

(Online publication March 11 2011)