Emotion Ontology Studies: A Framework for Expressing Feelings Digitally and its Application to Sentiment Analysis

Emotion ontologies have been developed to capture affect, a concept that encompasses discrete emotions and feelings, especially for research on sentiment analysis, which analyzes a customer's attitude towards a company or a product. However, there have been limited efforts to adapt and employ these ontologies. This research surveys and synthesizes emotion ontology studies to develop a Framework of Emotion Ontologies that can be used to help a user select or design an appropriate emotion ontology to support sentiment analysis and increase the user's understanding of the roles of affect, context, and behavioral information with respect to sentiment. The framework, which is derived from research on emotion ontologies, psychology, and sentiment analysis, classifies emotion ontologies as discrete emotion or one of two hybrid ontologies that are combinations of the discrete, dimensional, or componential process emotion paradigms. To illustrate its usefulness, the framework is applied to the development of an emotion ontology for a sentiment analysis application.