The Creation of a Chinese Emotion Ontology Based on HowNet

Full comprehension of language comes about by understanding the meaning and the emotion behind the communication. Understanding the meaning of language is the goal of natural language processing and research on semantic analysis. Understanding emotion is one of the goals of affective computing. The two areas of artificial intelligence have recently come together for understanding emotion in text. In order to help in this pursuit, this paper describes a Chinese emotion ontology based on HowNet and its construction. The ontology should go a long way in helping to understand, classifiy, and recognize emotion in Chinese. The ontology created in this paper is made up of Chinese emotion predicates that can help in understanding the emotion of the actors in sentences. The ontology was semi-automatically created using a simple three step process. The final ontology has just under 5,500 verb predicates covering 113 different emotion categories.