CruzAffect at AffCon 2019 Shared Task: A feature-rich approach to characterize happiness
This work addresses emotion analysis in text for researchers, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods with new feature combinations.
The authors tackled affective classification tasks using a feature-rich approach with traditional and deep learning models on the HappyDB dataset, achieving promising results on binary and multi-class prediction tasks.
We present our system, CruzAffect, for the CL-Aff Shared Task 2019. CruzAffect consists of several types of robust and efficient models for affective classification tasks. We utilize both traditional classifiers, such as XGBoosted Forest, as well as a deep learning Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) classifier. We explore rich feature sets such as syntactic features, emotional features, and profile features, and utilize several sentiment lexicons, to discover essential indicators of social involvement and control that a subject might exercise in their happy moments, as described in textual snippets from the HappyDB database. The data comes with a labeled set (10K), and a larger unlabeled set (70K). We therefore use supervised methods on the 10K dataset, and a bootstrapped semi-supervised approach for the 70K. We evaluate these models for binary classification of agency and social labels (Task 1), as well as multi-class prediction for concepts labels (Task 2). We obtain promising results on the held-out data, suggesting that the proposed feature sets effectively represent the data for affective classification tasks. We also build concepts models that discover general themes recurring in happy moments. Our results indicate that generic characteristics are shared between the classes of agency, social and concepts, suggesting it should be possible to build general models for affective classification tasks.