Predicting Complex Word Emotions and Topics through a Hierarchical Bayesian Network

In this paper, we provide a Word Emotion Topic (WET) model to predict the complex word emotion information from text, and discover the distribution of emotions among different topics. A complex emotion is defined as the combination of one or more singular emotions from following 8 basic emotion categories: joy, love, expectation, surprise, anxiety, sorrow, anger and hate. We use a hierarchical Bayesian network to model the emotions and topics in the text. Both the complex emotions and topics are drawn from raw texts, without considering any complicated language features. Our experiment shows promising results of word emotion prediction, which outperforms the traditional parsing methods such as the Hidden Markov Model and the Conditional Random Fields(CRFs) on raw text. We also explore the topic distribution by examining the emotion topic variation in an emotion topic diagram.