VIBES: visualizing changing emotional states in personal stories

ABSTRACT

Online journals (blogs) provide not only an outlet for emotional self-expression, but also a space for social interaction and commiseration through the exchange of personal stories. However, the massive extent of the blogosphere can overwhelm users, restricting their ability to make meaningful connections to fellow bloggers. In this article, we present a system, VIBES, that extracts the important topics from a blog, measures the emotions associated with those topics, and generates a suite of visualizations of this information. Unlike previous research, which has focused on extracting global trends in opinion across the blogosphere, VIBES focuses on depicting the emotional trajectories of the storylines that persist throughout the life experiences of the individual. In user tests, a majority of participants agreed that the visualizations revealed the author's current emotional state and emotional development over time. VIBES has potential applications both in connecting users via shared emotional profiles on social networks, as well as facilitating self-reflection through private user status displays. It also offers a fresh perspective for studying emotions and modeling how they change over time, which has a number of applications in affective computing, including the creation of emotionally responsive interfaces.

REFERENCES

• 1: C. H. Brooks and N. Montanez. An analysis of the effectiveness of tagging in blogs. In AAAI 2006 Spring Symposium on Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs 2006.
• 2: Xiaowen Ding , Bing Liu, The utility of linguistic rules in opinion mining, Proceedings of the 30th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, July 23-27, 2007, Amsterdam, The Netherlands [doi>10.1145/1277741.1277921]
• 3: Golan Levin and Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg. The dumpster. http: //artport. whitney. org/commissions/thedumpster/2005.
• 4: D. Goleman. emotional intelligence Bantam, 1995.
• 5: Zhu Jingbo , Yao Tianshun, A knowledge-based approach to text classification, Proceedings of the first SIGHAN workshop on Chinese language processing, p.1-5, September 01, 2002 [doi>10.3115/1118824.1118844]
• 6: Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. We feel fine. http://www.wefeelfine. org/2005.
• 7: J. Kamps and M. Marx. Words with attitude. In 1st International WordNet Conference pages 332--341, 2002.
• 8: Soo-Min Kim , Eduard Hovy, Determining the sentiment of opinions, Proceedings of the 20th international conference on Computational Linguistics, p.1367-es, August 23-27, 2004, Geneva, Switzerland [doi>10.3115/1220355.1220555]
• 9: Lun-Wei Ku , Li-Ying Lee , Tung-Ho Wu , Hsin-Hsi Chen, Major topic detection and its application to opinion summarization, Proceedings of the 28th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, August 15-19, 2005, Salvador, Brazil [doi>10.1145/1076034.1076161]
• 10: Kushal Dave , Steve Lawrence , David M. Pennock, Mining the peanut gallery: opinion extraction and semantic classification of product reviews, Proceedings of the 12th international conference on World Wide Web, May 20-24, 2003, Budapest, Hungary [doi>10.1145/775152.775226]
• 11: Gilly Leshed , Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye, Understanding how bloggers feel: recognizing affect in blog posts, CHI '06 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 22-27, 2006, Montréal, Québec, Canada [doi>10.1145/1125451.1125646]
• 12: Hang Li , Kenji Yamanishi, Topic analysis using a finite mixture model, Proceedings of the 2000 Joint SIGDAT conference on Empirical methods in natural language processing and very large corpora: held in conjunction with the 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, p.35-44, October 07-08, 2000, Hong Kong [doi>10.3115/1117794.1117799]
• 13: Hugo Liu , Henry Lieberman , Ted Selker, A model of textual affect sensing using real-world knowledge, Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, January 12-15, 2003, Miami, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/604045.604067]
• 14: Hugo Liu , Ted Selker , Henry Lieberman, Visualizing the affective structure of a text document, CHI '03 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/765891.765961]
• 15: Livejournal. About livejournal. http://www.livejournal.com/site/about.bml 2008.
• 16: LiveJournal. Random journal. http://www.livejournal.com/random.bml 2008.
• 17: Livejournal. Statistics. http://www.livejournal.com/stats.bml 2008.
• 18: Qiaozhu Mei , Xu Ling , Matthew Wondra , Hang Su , ChengXiang Zhai, Topic sentiment mixture: modeling facets and opinions in weblogs, Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web, May 08-12, 2007, Banff, Alberta, Canada [doi>10.1145/1242572.1242596]
• 19: Gilad Mishne , Maarten de Rijke, Deriving wishlists from blogs show us your blog, and we'll tell you what books to buy, Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web, May 23-26, 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland [doi>10.1145/1135777.1135947]
• 20: G. Mishne and M. de Rijke. Moodviews:Tools for blog mood analysis. In AAAI 2006 Spring Symposium on Computational Approaches to Analysing Weblogs 2006.
• 21: D. Nadeau. Semi-Supervised Named Entity Recognition PhD thesis, Ottawa-Carleton Institute for Computer Science, Ottawa, CA, 2007.
• 22: Nielsen BuzzMetric. Blogpulse. http://www.blogpulse.com 2008.
• 23: Jon Oberlander , Scott Nowson, Whose thumb is it anyway?: classifying author personality from weblog text, Proceedings of the COLING/ACL on Main conference poster sessions, p.627-634, July 17-18, 2006, Sydney, Australia
• 24: Pew Internet and American Life Project. Teens and social media, 2007.
• 25: Pew Internet and American Life Project. Internet activities, 2008.
• 26: Ana-Maria Popescu , Oren Etzioni, Extracting product features and opinions from reviews, Proceedings of the conference on Human Language Technology and Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, p.339-346, October 06-08, 2005, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada [doi>10.3115/1220575.1220618]
• 27: J. Schmidt. Blogging practices:An analytical framework. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12(4), 2007.
• 28: Stephanie Smale , Saul Greenberg, Transient life: collecting and sharing personal information, Proceedings of the 18th Australia conference on Computer-Human Interaction: Design: Activities, Artefacts and Environments, November 20-24, 2006, Sydney, Australia [doi>10.1145/1228175.1228184]
• 29: S. Sood, S. Owsley, K. Hammond, and L. Birnbaum. Reasoning Through Search: A Novel Approach to Sentiment Classification. submitted to EMNLP, July 2006.
• 30: S. O. Sood. Compelling Computation: Strategies for Mining the Interesting PhD thesis, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA, 2007. Adviser-Kristian Hammond.
• 31: Matthew Willis, An emotionally intelligent user interface: modelling emotion for user engagement, Proceedings of the 19th Australasian conference on Computer-Human Interaction: Entertaining User Interfaces, November 28-30, 2007, Adelaide, Australia [doi>10.1145/1324892.1324928]
• 32: Jeonghee Yi , Tetsuya Nasukawa , Razvan Bunescu , Wayne Niblack, Sentiment Analyzer: Extracting Sentiments about a Given Topic using Natural Language Processing Techniques, Proceedings of the Third IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, p.427, November 19-22, 2003

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.5 On-line Information Services
          Subjects: Web-based services

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval
          Subjects: Information filtering

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
affective computing, narrative, summarization, visualization, weblogs