Microblog Sentiment Analysis with Emoticon Space Model

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Abstract
Emoticons have been widely employed to express different types of moods, emotions, and feelings in microblog environments. They are therefore regarded as one of the most important signals for microblog sentiment analysis. Most existing studies use several emoticons that convey clear emotional meanings as noisy sentiment labels or similar sentiment indicators. However, in practical microblog environments, tens or even hundreds of emoticons are frequently adopted and all emoticons have their own unique emotional meanings. Besides, a considerable number of emoticons do not have clear emotional meanings. An improved sentiment analysis model should not overlook these phenomena. Instead of manually assigning sentiment labels to several emoticons that convey relatively clear meanings, we propose the emoticon space model (ESM) that leverages more emoticons to construct word representations from a massive amount of unlabeled data. By projecting words and microblog posts into an emoticon space, the proposed model helps identify subjectivity, polarity, and emotion in microblog environments. The experimental results for a public microblog benchmark corpus (NLP&CC 2013) indicate that ESM effectively leverages emoticon signals and outperforms previous state-of-the-art strategies and benchmark best runs.
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https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11390-015-1587-1

Exploiting emoticons in sentiment analysis

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ABSTRACT
As people increasingly use emoticons in text in order to express, stress, or disambiguate their sentiment, it is crucial for automated sentiment analysis tools to correctly account for such graphical cues for sentiment. We analyze how emoticons typically convey sentiment and demonstrate how we can exploit this by using a novel, manually created emoticon sentiment lexicon in order to improve a state-of-the-art lexicon-based sentiment classification method. We evaluate our approach on 2,080 Dutch tweets and forum messages, which all contain emoticons and have been manually annotated for sentiment. On this corpus, paragraph-level accounting for sentiment implied by emoticons significantly improves sentiment classification accuracy. This indicates that whenever emoticons are used, their associated sentiment dominates the sentiment conveyed by textual cues and forms a good proxy for intended sentiment.
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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2480362.2480498