Word Affect Intensities

Words often convey affect—emotions, feelings, and attitudes. Lexicons of word– affect association have applications in automatic emotion analysis and natural language generation. However, existing lexicons indicate only coarse categories of affect association. Here, for the first time, we create an affect intensity lexicon with real-valued scores of association. We use a technique called best–worst scaling that improves annotation consistency and obtains reliable fine-grained scores. The lexicon includes terms from general English as well as terms specific to social media communications. It has close to 6,000 entries for four basic emotions. We will be adding entries for other affect dimensions shortly.