Hell Hath No Fury? Correcting Bias In The Nrc Emotion Lexicon

There have been several attempts to create an accurate and thorough emotion lexicon in English, which identifies the emotional content of words. Of the several commonly used resources, the NRC emotion lexicon (Mohammad and Turney, 2013b) has received the most attention due to its availability, size, and its choice of Plutchik's expressive 8-class emotion model. In this paper we identify a large number of troubling entries in the NRC lexicon, where words that should in most contexts be emotionally neutral, with no affect (e.g., lesbian, stone, mountain), are associated with emotional labels that are inaccurate, nonsensical, pejorative, or, at best, highly contingent and context-dependent (e.g., lesbian labeled as DISGUST and SADNESS, stone as ANGER, or mountain as ANTICIPATION). We describe a procedure for semi-automatically correcting these problems in the NRC, which includes disambiguating POS categories and aligning NRC entries with other emotion lexicons to infer the accuracy of labels. We demonstrate via an experimental benchmark that the quality of the resources is thus improved. We release the revised resource and our code to enable other researchers to reproduce and build upon results.