A Deep Learning Framework for News Readers’ Emotion Prediction Based on Features From News Article and Pseudo Comments

With the rapid development of the Internet, readers tend to share their views and emotions about news events. Predicting these emotions provides a vital role in social media applications (e.g., sentiment retrieval, opinion summary, and election prediction). However, news articles usually consist of objective texts that lack emotion words, making emotion prediction challenging. From prior studies, we know that comments that come directly from readers are full of emotions. Therefore, in this article, we propose a deep learning framework that first merges article and comment information to predict readers’ emotions. At the same time, in the prediction process, we design a pseudo comment representation for unpublished news articles by the comments of published news. In addition, a better model is required to encode articles that contain implicit emotions. To solve this problem, we propose a block emotion attention network (BEAN) to encode news articles better. It includes an emotion attention mechanism and a hierarchical structure to capture emotion words and generate structural information during encoding. Experiments performed on three public datasets show that BEAN achieves the state-of-the-art average Pearson (AP) and accuracy (Acc@1). Moreover, results on four self-collected datasets show that both the introduction of emotional comments and BEAN in our framework improve the ability to predict readers’ emotions.