Affect analysis of text using fuzzy semantic typing

We propose a convenient fusion of natural-language processing and fuzzy logic techniques for analyzing affect content in free text; our main goals are fast analysis and visualization of affect content for decision-making. The primary linguistic resource for fuzzy semantic typing is the fuzzy affect lexicon, from which other important resources are generated, notably the fuzzy thesaurus and affect category groups. Free text is tagged with affect categories from the lexicon, and the affect categories' centralities and intensities are combined using techniques from fuzzy logic to produce affect sets fuzzy sets that represent the affect quality of a document. We show different aspects of affect analysis using news stories and movie reviews. Our experiments show a very good correspondence of affect sets with human judgments of affect content. We ascribe this to the effective representation of ambiguity in our fuzzy affect lexicon, and the ability of fuzzy logic to deal successfully with the ambiguity of words in natural language. Planned extensions of the system include personalized profiles for Web-based content dissemination, fuzzy retrieval, clustering and classification.