Build Emotion Lexicon from Microblogs by Combining Effects of Seed Words and Emoticons in a Heterogeneous Graph

As an indispensable resource for emotion analysis, emotion lexicons have attracted increasing attention in recent years. Most existing methods focus on capturing the single emotional effect of words rather than the emotion distributions which are helpful to model multiple complex emotions in a subjective text. Meanwhile, automatic lexicon building methods are overly dependent on seed words but neglect the effect of emoticons which are natural graphical labels of fine-grained emotion. In this paper, we propose a novel emotion lexicon building framework that leverages both seed words and emoticons simultaneously to capture emotion distributions of candidate words more accurately. Our method overcomes the weakness of existing methods by combining the effects of both seed words and emoticons in a unified three-layer heterogeneous graph, in which a multi-label random walk (MLRW) algorithm is performed to strengthen the emotion distribution estimation. Experimental results on real-world data reveal that our constructed emotion lexicon achieves promising results for emotion classification compared to the state-of-the-art lexicons.