IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON FUZZY SYSTEMS, VOL. 9, NO.
4, AUGUST 2001
Affect Analysis of Text Using
Fuzzy Semantic Typing
Pero Subasic, Member, IEEE, and Alison Huettner
Abstract—We propose a novel, convenient fusion of natural lan-
guage processing and fuzzy logic techniques for analyzing the af-
fect content in free text. Our main goals are fast analysis and visu-
alization of affect content for decision making. The main linguistic
resource for fuzzy semantic typing is the fuzzy-affect lexicon, from
which other important resources—the fuzzy thesaurus and affect
category groups—are generated. Free text is tagged with affect cat-
egories from the lexicon and the affect categories’ centralities and
intensities are combined using techniques from fuzzy logic to pro-
duce affect sets—fuzzy sets representing the affect quality of a doc-
ument. We show different aspects of affect analysis using news con-
tent and movie reviews. Our experiments show a good correspon-
dence between affect sets and human judgments of affect content.
We ascribe this to the representation of ambiguity in our fuzzy af-
fect lexicon and the ability of fuzzy logic to deal successfully with
the ambiguity of words in a natural language. Planned extensions
of the system include personalized profiles for Web-based content
dissemination, fuzzy retrieval, clustering, and classification.
Index Terms—Computing with words, fuzzy logic, knowledge
engineering, text mining, world wide web.
I. INTRODUCTION
T HE huge amount of text stored on computer systems is
getting larger every day. Moving beyond the basic assump-
tion that a given piece of text should be easily located, the next
generation of systems aims toward integrated, personalized ser-
vices and decision support. In these areas, a quick analysis of
particular qualities in the text and an intuitive presentation to
the user become increasingly important. To match an individual
user’s profile on the World Wide Web, for example, it is nec-
essary to introduce a human dimension into text understanding
and representation. Expectations for modeling the purely sub-
jective, human dimensions of text and data understanding are
high, on both the users’ and providers’ sides. Here we exper-
iment with qualitative analysis of affect-related information in
free text. Affect-related information includes words describing
emotions; like fear, anger, love, joy, and sorrow; feelings like
warmth and excitement; attitudes like helpful, friendly, hostile;
and other related categories such as temperament, humor, frame
of mind, mood, spirits, morale, and disposition (including words
like sweet, farce, wary, sanguine, depressed, eagerness, selfish).
Our reasons for selecting this particular domain are threefold.
First, affect-related information is pervasive in electronic doc-
uments: in news stories (on politics, competitive sports, etc.),
economic reports (corporate acquisitions, investor reactions),
Manuscript received September 11, 2000; revised May 8, 2001.
The authors are with the Clairvoyance Corporation, Pittsburgh, PA 15232
USA (e-mail: p.subasic@clairvoyancecorp.com).
Publisher Item Identifier S 1063-6706(01)06537-7.
1063–6706/01$10.00 © 2001 IEEE
483
customer-oriented Internet sites (eBay.com, amazon.com),
newsgroups (misc.consumer), corporate customer service,
email (customer complaints, questions, opinions), artistic
and cultural material (movie and art reviews), etc. Second,
affect information is critical to human communication: recent
work shows the importance of emotions in decision-making,
perception and learning [8]. And finally, we believe that con-
clusions with respect to affect are extensible to other types of
subjective information, such as flavors, styles, motivations, and
perceptions, in general. Potential applications for qualitative
text mining technology are completely open ended. This paper
is an extended version of an earlier paper [9]. Here, we present
our work in more detail and present more application examples.
Analyzing affect in a text presents us with two obvious
sources of ambiguity and imprecision: the first being emotions
themselves and the second, words in a natural language [10].
Rather than attempting to constrain and limit this ambiguity, we
have taken the opposite approach. We explicitly represent and
process ambiguity by introducing fuzzy logic into the picture.
Specifically, we integrate basic techniques from fuzzy logic and
from computing with words [13] with techniques from natural
language processing (NLP). This work is also very related to
the recent work on representing and manipulating perceptions
[14]. Since the central technique we use from NLP is semantic
typing [7], we refer to this approach as fuzzy semantic typing.
The fuzzy semantic typing approach is general in scope and
can be applied to many different kinds of analysis. We illustrate
its use in analyzing affect. At the most basic level, it involves:
1) isolating a vocabulary of words belonging to a meta-lin-
guistic domain (here, affect or emotion);
2) using multiple categorizations and scalar metrics to rep-
resent the meaning of each word in that domain;
3) computing profiles for texts based on the categorizations
and scores of their component domain words;
4) manipulating the profiles to visualize the texts.
We take a multi-faceted approach to representing and manip-
ulating qualitative information. We begin with an affect lexicon,
which characterizes a large vocabulary of affect words in terms
of a small set of basic categories, such as love, hate, happiness,
and anger, each to some numerical degree. The categories from
the affect lexicon constitute semantic tags, which are associated
with words within a broad semantic domain.
In the past, semantic tagging has generally been used for the-
matic role assignment [3] or for word sense disambiguation
(WSD) [4]. Our approach is similar to the standard WSD ap-
proach in that the lexicon entry for an ambiguous word rep-
resents all of its possible meanings. However, where WSD re-
quires selecting a single meaning for the word in context, our
484
system simply assigns them all, exploiting rather than reducing
the word’s ambiguity. For any relevant word that appears in a
text, we include all of its possible meanings and connotations in
our analysis of that text; and, we depend on the associated nu-
merical weightings and the cumulative effect of related vocab-
ulary to create a realistic picture of the text’s affective content.
Semantic treatments of lexical ambiguity are more typically
components of machine translation than of information retrieval
(IR) or filtering systems, although there is some evidence that
ambiguity resolution can improve performance in IR [6]. Our
approach is unusual in integrating lexico-semantic tags into a
general-purpose text management system, capable of IR, fil-
tering, categorization, and potentially other text management
functions.
We have dealt with ambiguity by allowing a single lexicon
entry (domain word) to belong to multiple semantic categories.
Imprecision is handled, not only via multiple category assign-
ments, but also by allowing degrees of relatedness (centrality)
between lexicon entries and their various categories. Gleeful,
for example, is assigned to both happiness and excitement, but
is given a higher centrality score in the happiness category. In
addition to centralities, lexicon entries are also assigned numer-
ical intensities, which represent the strength of the affect level
described by that word. Thus, for example, abhorrent and dis-
tasteful have roughly the same centrality on the repulsion scale,
but abhorrent receives a higher intensity.
After the affect words in a document are tagged, the fuzzy
logic part of the system handles them by using fuzzy combina-
tion operators, set extension operators, and a fuzzy thesaurus to
analyze fuzzy sets representing affects. Fuzzy techniques pro-
vide an excellent framework for computational management of
the ambiguity and imprecision that are pervasive in the words
of a natural language. There are additional reasons why fuzzy
logic is a good choice for text management. First, eliminating
ambiguity and imprecision from texts is unnatural and leads to
misconceptions about the underlying meaning. When properly
understood and managed, ambiguity and imprecision lead to en-
hanced, more concrete and precise representations than other
(e.g., statistical) methods used for text analysis. This is espe-
cially true in the case of qualitative analysis, when we are inter-
ested in what essential features are present in some content. And
second, since their emphasis is qualitative, fuzzy techniques are
more appealing to humans, who tend to think qualitatively; this
makes them good candidates for any human-friendly applica-
tion. The appeal of fuzzy analysis will become apparent when
we show visualizations of affect sets later in this document.
Besides the fuzzy affect lexicon, we generate additional re-
sources for enhanced functionality. A fuzzy thesaurus is gener-
ated from the affect lexicon and used to expand affect sets; affect
category groups are generated by clustering the fuzzy thesaurus
to enable easier visualization, navigation, and browsing for the
user. We provide a detailed explanation of these resources and
the ways in which we generate them, with several practical ex-
amples, in Section II.
A primary representation vehicle in our system is a set of
fuzzy semantic categories (affect categories) followed by their
centralities and/or intensities, called the affect set. An affect set
with attached centralities is always treated as a pure fuzzy set,
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON FUZZY SYSTEMS, VOL. 9, NO. 4, AUGUST 2001
and all fuzzy techniques applicable to fuzzy sets are applied to
such affect sets. The handling of affect sets with intensities is
different and more statistical, since, intensities represent less
ambiguous, more quantitative features of the text. Affect sets
and the fuzzy semantic typing technique are presented in Sec-
tion III.
Finally, visualization is a very important issue in our system.
It demonstrates the real power of fuzzy semantic typing by pre-
senting a concise, to-the-point, qualitative representation of af-
fect in texts. Such visualizations constitute an excellent tool for
decision making. We show some interesting visualization sam-
ples of affect sets for movies and news articles in Section IV.
In Section V, we illustrate computational applications of the ap-
proach: retrieval of phrases whose affect content is similar to
that of a given phrase and filtering of phrases based on a pre-set
intensity threshold. In Section VI, we discuss ideas for further
development of the system and in Section VII we summarize
the paper and its conclusions.
II. LINGUISTIC RESOURCES
This section describes the linguistic resources of the fuzzy
typing system: the affect lexicon, the fuzzy thesaurus and the
affect category groups.
A. Affect Lexicon
The affect lexicon is a compendium of lexical entries for af-
fect words, with their corresponding parts of speech, affect cat-
egories, centralities, and intensities. Affect words were gath-
ered from several sources. We began with an existing affect
wordlist collected from newspaper articles by Mark Kantrowitz
of Justsystem Pittsburgh Research Center. We converted the list
to a new format and supplemented it rather haphazardly from
an on-line thesaurus. We are currently experimenting with a
more systematic, semi-automatic collection method based on
WordNet [2], which we hope will prove both scalable and trans-
ferable.
An affect word is any word having an affect-related meaning
or connotation: e.g., abhor, abusive, amity, apprehend, arro-
gance, etc. Any given affect word may have multiple entries
in the affect lexicon, differing by part of speech value and/or
category. The expressions of interest are a superset of simple
"emotion" words: they include emotions (happiness), feelings
(desire), attitudes (resentful), temperament (good-natured),
humor (hilarious), frame of mind (cheerful), mood (sulk),
spirits (morale), and disposition (sunny). We represent an affect
word’s meaning by associating the word with one or more
affect categories, from our initial inventory of 83 "atomic"
affects. A relatively straightforward affect word, like terror
will be associated with a single affect category. An affect word
with a more complex meaning will be assigned to multiple
categories—for example, infatuation is assigned to both love
and insanity. An ambiguous word is simply assigned to all the
categories necessary to capture its various meanings: e.g., mad
has three entries, associating it with insanity in its first sense
and with irritation and anger in its second. All lexicon entries
are root forms; forms in the text are part-of-speech tagged and
stemmed before lookup.
SUBASIC AND HUETTNER: AFFECT ANALYSIS OF TEXT USING FUZZY SEMANTIC TYPING
Entries in the affect lexicon are of this form
as in
Lexical entry is a single entry for a word that has an affectual
connotation or denotes an affect directly. At present, our fuzzy
affect lexicon contains 3876 lexical entries, about half of what
we plan.
Part of speech tag. Since ambiguity sometimes depends on
a word’s part of speech—and since NLP allows us to differ-
entiate parts of speech in documents— we have included POS
information for lexicon entries. For example, the word alert has
different category assignments associated with different POS
values
That is, the adjective alert means quick to perceive and act—a
kind of intelligence—while the verb alert means to call to a
state of readiness—a kind of warning.
A word’s POS can affect its centrality or intensity values as
well as its category assignment. For example, lexicon entries
with POS, categories, and centrality degrees for the word craze
include
That is, the verb craze belongs to affect category insanity with a
degree of 0.8; the singular noun craze belongs to the same cat-
egory with a degree of 0.5. This reflects the fact that the verb
craze means to make insane or as if insane—very central to the
insanity category!—while the noun craze means an exagger-
ated and often transient enthusiasm—i.e., it belongs to insanity
only in a less central, more metaphorical sense.
Affect category. Many of our categories have strayed some-
what from the strictly affect domain: for example, deprivation,
health, and intelligence are only marginally affects, and death,
destruction and justice are not affects at all. Such categories
have been created in cases where (a) some significant portion
of an affect word’s meaning cannot be captured using pure af-
fect categories; and (b) the same meaning component recurred
again and again in the vocabulary we were trying to handle. For
example, a word like corpse certainly entails some affect, and
can plausibly be assigned to categories sadness and horror; at
the same time, a part of its meaning is obviously being missed
by those categorizations. Moreover, words like assassination,
cyanide, execute, funeral, genocide, and homicidal share this
missing meaning component. On this first pass, we have gone
ahead and created extra, not-strictly-affect categories to handle
such words; in the future, when we review and revise the cate-
gory inventory, we may rethink this decision.
At present, there are 83 affect categories. Each affect category
has an explicit opposite, with three exceptions: death, irritation
and crime. Affect words are spread unevenly across affect cate-
gories, with the least frequent categories being health, sickness
and facilitation (only 0.35% of entries), and most frequent being
485
conflict and violence (3.7% of entries). The complete list of af-
fect categories with their opposites is given in Appendix A.
Centrality. Centrality degrees range from 0 to 1 by incre-
ments of 0.1. A word that belongs to several affect categories
will generally have different centralities from category to cate-
gory, as in this example
That is, the element of weakness is fairly central to the word
emasculate (a rating of 0.7); the notion of a specific lack is also
present but less central (rating of 0.4); and an additional element
of violence is possible but not really necessary (rating of 0.3).
In assigning centrality, typical questions the lexicon devel-
oper should answer for each entry and affect category include:
To what extent is affect word X related to category C? To what
extent does affect word X co-occur with category C? To what ex-
tent can affect word X be replaced with category C in the text,
without changing the meaning?
Since centralities indicate the presence of certain qualities
(represented by appropriate affect categories) in a given affect
word, centrality computations are handled as computations of
fuzzy membership degrees.
Intensity. In addition to centralities, lexicon entries are as-
signed numerical intensities, which represent the strength of the
affect level described by that entry. Intensity degrees, like cen-
trality degrees, range from 0 to 1 by increments of 0.1. Here are
some examples (the second number represents the intensity)
All of these words have some element or connotation of repul-
sion. A word like abhor expresses very intense repulsion (as
well as being very central to the concept of repulsion); con-
tempt, aversion, and displeasure are progressively less intense
on the repulsion scale. A word like fat—which is not at all cen-
tral to the repulsion concept, as expressed by its low centrality
of 0.2, but which has some slight overtones of repulsion to many
Americans—is an objective description, hence, hardly an affect
word at all. This is reflected in its low intensity score of 0.1. In
general, scores below 0.4 on both scales tend to be the most sub-
jective and notional, since it is easier to rate prominent qualities
than backgrounded ones.
A word that belongs to several affect categories will generally
have different intensities from category to category, as in this
example
That is, avenge is a high-intensity conflict word, but only a mod-
erate-intensity word with respect to violence; its intensity rating
for justice is somewhere in between.
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Assigning category labels and membership degrees to lexicon
entries is a very subjective process. During the present proof-of-
concept phase, the assignments have been made by a single lin-
guist. They are obviously influenced by the linguist’s own expe-
rience, reading background, and (since affects are in question)
personal/emotional background and prejudices. Though subjec-
tive, the process is not completely arbitrary—the assignments
are general enough in the main to yield useful results. Ideally,
however, we would like to involve additional linguists, to re-
view and refine the inventory of atomic categories and to ensure
some consensus on the representation of difficult items. In a fin-
ished system, repeated iterations and use of additional profiles
or personal lexicons will allow the individual user to fine-tune
membership degrees and accommodate his or her own subjec-
tive criteria.
B. Fuzzy Thesaurus
The fuzzy thesaurus establishes relationships between pairs
of affect categories, based on the centralities of items assigned
to both categories in the lexicon. It contains entries of the form
as in
arranged in a matrix. When the relationship degree is equal to
0, no entry is recorded in the fuzzy thesaurus. When the rela-
tionship degree is equal to 1.0 we say that we have discovered
affectual synonyms, as in
Non-synonymous pairs having entries in the matrix are related
to some specified degree.
The fuzzy thesaurus is generated by the system from the affect
lexicon. It is generated using max-min composition [12]
(1)
where are affect categories whose relationship degree
we want to compute and
represent the centralities of affect categories with re-
spect to affect . are taken directly from
the affect lexicon.
The fuzzy thesaurus is primarily used for expansion of affect
sets. For example, a single affect category humor with a cen-
trality of 0.7 is expanded using the similarity class for humor
from the fuzzy thesaurus. Using max-min composition, we ex-
pand this affect intensity profile as follows
humor humor excitement intelligence
humor excitement intelligence
(2)
where represents the composition operator.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON FUZZY SYSTEMS, VOL. 9, NO. 4, AUGUST 2001
Since it is difficult to modify the affect intensity set consis-
tently to reflect the changes in the affect centrality set, we leave
it to the user to accommodate the intensities of the added cate-
gories for his/her particular purposes.
Expansion increases the number of categories and the level
of detail, as shown in Section IV.
Note, that since the fuzzy thesaurus is generated from the af-
fect lexicon, it must be recomputed and re-generated whenever
the affect lexicon changes. For efficiency, only those entries di-
rectly affected by a change are recomputed.
C. Affect Category Groups
Affect category groups are generated automatically by clus-
tering the fuzzy thesaurus. In this process, affect categories with
high degrees of similarity (as defined in the fuzzy thesaurus)
are grouped together. For example, we find that love, attraction,
happiness, desire and pleasure form one affect category group,
while repulsion, horror, inferiority and pain form another. If
the automatically-created groups are not as intuitively natural
as these examples, the user can edit them.
Affect category group ACG is a set of affect categories
such that
(3)
where is a user-set threshold. It is worth
noting that ACG is not a similarity relation in the sense of Zadeh
[12], since it lacks the transitivity property. The lack of transi-
tivity is a direct consequence of the fact that the ACG is gener-
ated from the fuzzy thesaurus, which is in turn generated from
the affect lexicon. Transitivity can be enforced by computing
the missing relationship degrees from the existing ones. How-
ever, we prefer to keep the original relationship degrees intact,
in order to ensure the proper interpretation of the original affect
category assignments reflected in the affect lexicon.
Affect category groups can be used for more efficient group-
ings of affect categories in visualization charts. An example is
shown in Section IV.
Since the affect category groups are computed from the fuzzy
thesaurus, each time the fuzzy thesaurus is changed, the affect
category groups must be recomputed. This is a computationally
inexpensive operation, since the number of affect categories in-
volved is typically small—in our prototype, there are only 83
categories.
III. FUZZY SEMANTIC TYPING
Fuzzy semantic typing is the process in which domain words
from a document are identified. The words are assigned meta-in-
formation from the typing lexicon in the form of semantic cat-
egories and associated degrees; and the categories and degrees
are combined to yield the overall representation of the docu-
ment’s content. In this section, we describe in detail the steps in
this process for affect analysis.
A. Affect Sets
A central construct in our affect analysis is the affect set. It
comprises the set of unique affect categories from a given text,
SUBASIC AND HUETTNER: AFFECT ANALYSIS OF TEXT USING FUZZY SEMANTIC TYPING 487

have something to throw if the audience

attacked him).
This document is tagged with

on the basis of its two affect words, uproar and attacked.

Note, that since the word attacked belongs to both the affect
categories violence and conflict, both categories are included as
document tags.
2) Combination of Centralities and Intensities and Docu-
ment Affect Set: The following algorithm describes how to re-
duce the initial affect set by combining the centralities and in-
tensities of recurring categories.
1) For each affect category that appears in the tagging set:
a) Compute the maximal centrality (fuzzy union) of all
centralities attached to that affect category in the
tagged document. The result is the centrality of that
category for the document as a whole.
b) Compute the average intensity of all intensities at-
tached to that affect category in the tagged docu-
ment. The result is the intensity of that category for
the document as a whole.
2) Counts of affect categories are combined with intensities
using simple averaging to yield the overall intensity score
for the document.
As an example, consider the following document:
Fig. 1. Generation of the document affect set, a fuzzy set representing affective
content of a document. Luis Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel
(1962) is a macabre comedy, a mordant view
of human nature that suggests we harbor
with attached centralities and intensities. The following sections savage instincts and unspeakable secrets.
discuss the generation of an affect set for a general document. Take a group of prosperous dinner guests
and pen them up long enough, he suggests,
and they’ll turn on one another like rats
B. Tagging of Free Text in an overpopulation study. Bunuel be-
gins with small, alarming portents. The
The process for tagging a document with an affect set is cook and the servants suddenly put on
shown in Fig. 1. It includes the following steps. their coats and escape, just as the dinner
1) Normalization and Tagging: guests are arriving. The hostess is fu-
rious; she planned an after-dinner enter-
1) The document is parsed and tokens (individual words) are tainment involving a bear and two sheep.
generated one at a time. Now it will have to be canceled. It is
2) Each token is normalized using normalization rules for typical of Bunuel that such surrealistic
English language, shown as Grammar in Fig. 1. touches are dropped in without comment.
3) The normalized tokens are looked up in the affect lexicon. The dinner party is a success. The guests
If a token has one or several lexicon entries, we retrieve whisper slanders about each other, their
all affect categories with their associated centrality and eyes playing across the faces of their
intensity scores. fellow guests with greed, lust and envy.
Using this algorithm, we generate the initial affect set for each After dinner, they stroll into the drawing
document. room, where we glimpse a woman’s purse,
As an example, consider a simple document consisting of filled with chicken feathers and rooster
this sentence: claws.
His first film, Un Chien Andalou (1928), The output produced after fuzzy semantic tagging is given in
co-directed by Salvador Dali, caused an Table I.
uproar (he filled his pockets with stones, We combine recurring affect categories into a set of unique
he wrote in his autobiography, so he would tags, with centralities and intensities that accurately reflect the
488
TABLE I
ENTRIES AND ASSOCIATED AFFECT CATEGORIES WITH CENTRALITIES AND
INTENSITIES FOR THE MOVIE REVIEW OF EXTERMINATING ANGEL
overall document content. For this purpose, we discard the orig-
inal affect words and the POS information, and combine the in-
tensities and centralities of the remaining affect categories.
Intensities and centralities are handled differently, since they
represent different types of information. Centrality indicates the
purity of a quality represented by an affect category. Intensity
indicates the strength of that quality. Thus, the number of oc-
currences of a particular affect category in the document does
not affect its centrality, but does affect its intensity. Centrality, as
the purity of a quality, depends on the maximal centrality over
all instances of that affect category in a particular document.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON FUZZY SYSTEMS, VOL. 9, NO. 4, AUGUST 2001
That is to say, the maximal purity of the quality in the document
already implies vaguer or more diluted degrees of that quality
and, therefore, is appropriate as the combined centrality/purity
for that category. The appropriate operation here is thus fuzzy
union. On the other hand, the more times an affect category is
present in the document and the higher the intensities of its in-
stances, the higher will be the combined intensity/strength at-
tached to it. We, therefore, compute the intensity attached to an
affect category as the average of all intensities attached to in-
stances of that category. We believe this model is closer to how
humans perceive intensities of words as they read. For example,
if we encounter only one instance of a “strong” word (for ex-
ample, greed in the desire category), together with many “weak”
words (for example, wish, want, prefer), the “weak” words will
influence the intensity proportionally and reduce the overall ef-
fect of the “strong” word. This is why we compute the average
rather than some other function, such as the maximum—a max-
imum would imply that the intensity of the “strongest” word is
the intensity for the whole article, which is not what we expe-
rience while reading. Another plausible approach would be to
weight intensities depending on their position in the text, giving
heavier weight to words near the beginning of the document, or
belonging to highly exposed parts of the document, such as the
title or abstract.
After computing centralities using fuzzy union and arranging
elements so that the elements with higher membership degrees
(centralities) are at the front of the fuzzy set, we have
violence, humor, warning, anger, success, slander, greed
horror, aversion absurdity, excitement, desire
pleasure, promise, surfeit repulsion, fear
lack, death, slyness, intelligence, deception, insanity
clarity, innocence, inferiority
pain, disloyalty, failure, creation, surprise
(4)
This representation of the fuzzy set of affect categories enables
us easily to spot predominant qualities of affect categories in
the document. The meaning of this affect category set is that
the document has a high degree of violence, humor, warning,
anger, success, slander, greed, horror, aversion, absurdity, ex-
citement, desire, pleasure, promise and surfeit; a medium de-
gree of repulsion, fear, lack, death, slyness, intelligence, de-
ception, insanity, clarity, innocence and inferiority; and a low
degree of pain, disloyalty, failure, creation and surprise.
To compute the overall intensity we use a simple average over
all affect category instances and their respective intensities
(5)
where
overall intensity of a document ;
total number of affect category instances in the
document ;
intensity of an affect category instance .
For the example document, overall intensity is 0.6.
SUBASIC AND HUETTNER: AFFECT ANALYSIS OF TEXT USING FUZZY SEMANTIC TYPING 489

Fig. 2. Centralities with positive connotations up are shown separately from those whose connotations are negative. Affect categories are arranged into similar
groups around the circle.

Fig. 3. When all centralities from Fig. 2 are expanded using the fuzzy thesaurus, we get a greater level of detail. Note that additional affect categories exist in the
new chart. Centrality values are omitted for greater legibility (scale 0–1).

Overall intensity is used to detect documents with offensive IV. AFFECT SET VISUALIZATION
content. For example, high overall intensity (0.7) in com-
bination with the specific centrality profile distaste An interesting and important area related to the fuzzy typing
violence pain may indicate offensive and work is visualization of the results. We have developed a simple
undesirable content. affect tagging and affect profile browsing application called the
490 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON FUZZY SYSTEMS, VOL. 9, NO. 4, AUGUST 2001

Fig. 4. News report on train crash in London, October 1999. Centralities describe quality, and intensities, quantity (count and strength) of the affects in a document.
As might be expected, the affects fear, harm, pain and surprise are most central. The most intense affects are conflict, confusion, disadvantage and pain.

Fig. 5. Profile of a recent cult movie Matrix generated from a movie review. Opposite affect categories are placed on opposite sides of the circle (the left side
shows negative affects, the right side, positive). With a well-developed negative side, this movie is deservedly rated “R” in the US.

Affect Inspector. We show a basic browsing setup from that ap-
plication in Appendix B.
Each affect category’s centralities and intensities can be rep-
resented as a point on the perimeter of a unit circle. Centralities
and intensities can then be visualized, as shown in Figs. 2–8. In
order to demonstrate various ways these charts can be organized,
we show different charts for different information objects.
In Fig. 2 we show centralities with positive affects separated
from centralities with mainly negative affects, for the movie re-
view of Exterminating Angel. In this way, the positive versus
the negative side of the document can be easily analyzed. More-
over, groups of similar affect categories are shown close to each
other. This facilitates a quick overview of aspects denoted by
those groups. For example, in Fig. 2, clarity, creation and intel-
ligence are not as well developed as success, desire, pleasure,
humor and excitement. Groups of similar affect categories are
generated using the technique discussed in Section II-C.
When all affect categories from Fig. 2 are expanded using the
fuzzy thesaurus, we obtain the chart in Fig. 3. The chart contains
both positive and negative affects, with a higher level of detail,
since new affect categories have been added to the chart through
expansion.
In Fig. 4 we show the affect structure of a news report con-
cerning a train crash in London. We show both centralities and
intensities for qualities typical of news on accidents.
Opposing affect categories can be placed on opposite sides of
the circle with respect to the center point. This is illustrated in
Fig. 5, for centralities in a Matrix review. With this arrangement,
we can easily spot which part of the circle is best developed and
understand its affective impact.
SUBASIC AND HUETTNER: AFFECT ANALYSIS OF TEXT USING FUZZY SEMANTIC TYPING 491

Fig. 6. Centralities (up) and intensities in T. S. Eliot’s famous “Rhapsody on a Windy Night.” Even the surrealistic content of this poem can be succesfully
analyzed. The poem contains mixed affects of weakness, disadvantage, insanity and strength, clarity and openness. For intensities, clarity, weakness, and
inferiority seem to prevail.

Affect categories can be generated for sets of movies. We TABLE II

analyzed sets in the romance, action, science fiction, comedy, CENTRALITY RESULTS BY TYPE
and family genres. Each set contains about 15 movies and some
movies belong to multiple sets (for example, 12 Monkeys be-
longs both to the action and science fiction genres). The results
are shown in Table II, along with profiles for news about acci-
dents. The generated profiles confirm our expectations about
affect categories for different movie genres: romance movies
showed high levels of happiness, innocence and justice; action
movies scored high on surprise, strength and slyness; family
movies emphasized sensitivity, morality, responsibility and
nurturance; and so on. The composite profiles also reveal some
less obvious features: high levels of immorality and inferiority
in the romance movie set, and high levels of inferiority and
destruction in the comedies, for example. Although the results
in many cases represent typical characteristics of movie genres,
we believe that some aspects of the results may reflect only the
selected movies within the genre.
Next, we show that poetry can be analyzed using this ap-
proach. Fig. 6 shows centralities and intensities for a famous
poem with a very accurate affect profile.
Another application of this technique is personalization.
We generated affect profiles for different users based on their
movie preferences and the results clearly reflect different
personal tastes. The illustration in Fig. 7 shows the centrality
affect profiles obtained after merging profiles for each person’s
favorite movies. In merging centrality affect profiles, we use the
same approach as when merging affect profiles of individual
words or sentences, that is, the union (maximum) operator.

V. COMPUTING WITH AFFECT PROFILES

To illustrate the computational potential of the fuzzy semantic
typing framework, we present here an example of retrieval based
on similarities drawn from affect categories. We illustrate the
technique on retrieval of similar phrases, but it extends equally
492
TABLE III
PHRASE RETRIEVAL
well to retrieval of larger portions of texts, such as sentences or
paragraphs. Here is the outline of the experiment from which
we produced Table III.
1) We found the affect profile of the sentence fear, anger,
grief and pain filled the room.
2) We retrieved all phrases from a precompiled list of 34
phrases, from four different documents that had affect
profiles most similar to the seed phrase. As a similarity
measure between the affect profile of the seed phrase
and the affect profile of a candidate phrase , we use [15]
(6)
where represents the sum of the intersections (min-
imum values) of the affect sets’ centralities for the respective
affect categories and represents the sum of the unions
(maximum values) of the affect sets’ centralities for the respec-
tive affect categories.
We found phrases as presented in Table III, ordered by de-
creasing scores for similarity to the seed phrase. Each phrase is
shown with its respective affect centrality and intensity profiles,
similarity degrees, and average intensities.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON FUZZY SYSTEMS, VOL. 9, NO. 4, AUGUST 2001
This retrieval-by-similarity technique can be complemented
with the filtering-on-intensity technique. For example, we can
set the intensity threshold to a certain category’s intensity, and
filter out all expressions whose intensity for that category is
greater than the threshold intensity. Alternatively, we can set the
threshold on overall intensity and filter out all documents with
intensities higher than the given threshold.
Such similarity computations can be conveniently combined
with statistical methods. For short phrases like those shown
here, the similarity measure we used is very convenient since
it reflects the overlapping of qualitative features (affect cat-
egories) without taking into account statistical features like
number of words or categories. In certain cases, it may be
reasonable to use a vector space model with cosine similarity
to find similar phrases. One must be careful, however, as that
approach will not always return the desired qualitative profile.
To illustrate this point, let us imagine that we have submitted
the query love, pain to a text corpus and that we are searching
for sentences that have both qualities—i.e., sentences that
match both love and pain. However, vector space retrieval
would return sentences containing many instances of love with
a high score, even if there is no mention of pain in them. Our
similarity computation, on the other hand, gives preference
SUBASIC AND HUETTNER: AFFECT ANALYSIS OF TEXT USING FUZZY SEMANTIC TYPING
Fig. 7. Affect profiles generated from personal movie preferences. Each person submitted from 10 to 81 favorite movies. Individual movie profiles are merged
using the maximum operator on centralities to yield the personal profiles in this figure.
to documents having higher-level maximal centralities for
both categories, regardless of their total count in the sentence.
This example clearly illustrates the main differences in the
quantitative vs. the qualitative approach to love and pain.
In the quantitative approach, we are concerned with finding
information that is statistically similar to our query. In the
qualitative approach, we are more concerned with a particular
qualitative profile of the target information.
VI. FURTHER DEVELOPMENT
The fuzzy semantic typing approach deals well with ambi-
guity and imprecision in free text. It can be effectively combined
with a set of visualization tools for easy, accurate analysis of the
affect content in a document. These results are promising, but
we feel that we have just begun exploration in uncharted terri-
tory. Our plans in the immediate future include:
1) Enrichment of the existing affect typing mech-
anism. To the extent that expressions in free text and
their constituent words have syntactically and semanti-
cally different roles, we are making an approximation
by using fuzzy union to compute centralities. Although
individual affect words are treated equally, their roles
are frequently uneven. For example, modifiers (very,
more or less, not), comparative and superlative adjec-
tives, adverbial phrases, noun phrases, and complex
phrases (with and/or connectives, etc.) all represent
different classes of expressions with possibly different
roles in a phrase or sentence. A finer-grained analysis
493
would, therefore, lead to different centrality combina-
tion operators for each of these classes.
The same holds true for the hierarchical centrality
computation, but to a lesser extent, since text hier-
archies are more regular and do not have as richly
varying a structure. Still, for many documents, sen-
tences and paragraphs can be assigned weights that
reflect their relative importance in centrality compu-
tations. For example, since report-style prose is typi-
cally “front-loaded,” a possible approach would be to
increase the centrality of categories appearing in the
title, summary, or lead paragraph of such texts.
2) Support for management of linguistic resources.
We would like to begin experimenting with personal
(user-initiated) updating of general-purpose affect lex-
icons. This would include the modification of central-
ities and intensities attached to affect categories, the
addition or removal of affect words, the definition of
complex affect categories in terms of basic affect cate-
gories, and the tuning of the fuzzy thesaurus to reflect
changes in the affect lexicon. It would be especially
interesting to experiment with different affect lexicons
on the sending and receiving sides of a communica-
tion. In such an experiment, a message composed with
a help of personal affect lexicon would be interpreted
using personal lexicon .
3) Generalization of the fuzzy typing framework.
Fuzzy typing may be adapted to many different appli-
cation areas by developing appropriate resources: busi-
494 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON FUZZY SYSTEMS, VOL. 9, NO. 4, AUGUST 2001

Fig. 8. Basic browsing setup in TreeViewer. The tree view at upper right shows a browsable text hierarchy; the text pane at lower right displays analyzed text.
Affect centrality and affect intensity sets appear on the left. Circles represent average values.

ness, food/cooking, fashion, architectural styles, cul-
tural events and artistic material, psychology-related
material, wine and beer, perfumes.
4) Analysis of different points of view. Using an
affect lexicon, we can analyze affects in a text. Using
a lexicon with expressions and types that describe in-
tentions (e.g., would like to, will, is considering, is
thinking about) would give us an intention finger-
print for a document. Using both lexicons at the
same time, to find a text’s affectual and intentional
fingerprints, could reveal interesting juxtapositions in
the data.
5) Integration with existing text management
techniques. Although not currently included in our
system, quasistatistical information can be generated
to complement qualitative analysis. This would
involve a simple extension of common statistical
approaches like statistical indexing, term-weighting,
IDF-TF scoring and cosine distance [5], on a
full feature space (all terms and phrases), or on
SUBASIC AND HUETTNER: AFFECT ANALYSIS OF TEXT USING FUZZY SEMANTIC TYPING 495

TABLE IV
THE COMPLETE LIST OF AFFECT CATEGORIES AND RESPECTIVE OPPOSITE AFFECT CATEGORIES

a significantly reduced feature space consisting
of a limited number of affect categories. Fuzzy
typing would then be complemented with retrieval
techniques applied to affect profiles: e.g., querying
and retrieval, clustering and classification. We
believe the best way to approach this issue is to
start with basic similarity assumptions as given in
[11], and further investigate techniques from [12]
and [15] for computing similarities between fuzzy
objects. Finally, we hope to devise an algorithm that
effectively combines statistical and quasistatistical
similarity scores with fuzzy similarity scores to
compute the overall similarity of two texts.
6) Extension to additional languages. While the
lexicon for our prototype system was created man-
ually, we are currently experimenting with a more
systematic, semi-automatic collection method based
on WordNet [2]. If this technique proves successful,
it could be applied to foreign language semantic nets
such as EuroWordNet [1], to accommodate a variety
of other languages.
VII. CONCLUSION
We describe a novel approach to text analysis that combines
semantic typing techniques from natural language processing
496
with fuzzy techniques, under the common framework of fuzzy
semantic typing. Fuzzy semantic typing is an innovative way
to capture metalinguistic facts about a text while allowing for
linguistic ambiguity and vagueness. From our analysis of gen-
erated profiles for news reports and movie reviews, we believe
that the metalinguistic representation can be usefully applied
in retrieval, clustering, and classification. The approach is ap-
plicable to an indefinite number of domains and lends itself to
customization for a particular user or task. We look forward to
continuing our research in these directions.
APPENDIX A
See Table IV.
APPENDIX B
AFFECT INSPECTOR APPLICATION
In Fig. 8 we show an example screen from our affect inspector
application, illustrating the display of a profile’s centralities and
intensities at different levels of the text hierarchy. The essential
part of the browsing system is the TreeViewer. It is a Java/XML
application that contains a text hierarchy in the form of a tree.
Each node in the tree is clickable, and clicking on it displays
the affect profile associated with that node in two panes on the
left—the centrality profile in the upper pane, the intensity pro-
file in the lower. The circles represent the average values for
centralities (upper left) and intensities (lower left). The text as-
sociated with the node is displayed in the lower right pane.
Browsing is possible at any level of the hierarchy from top to
bottom: corpus, document, paragraph, sentence, affect category.
Affect profiles to the left are click-sensitive maps: by clicking
on certain points, one can search on individual affects, or change
the form of the current display to see opposite category place-
ments, linear placements, or placements ordered by decreasing
scores. Such arrangements facilitate easy browsing, verification
of affect profiles, and comparison of affect profiles for different
text elements, both vertically (affect-sentence-paragraph-docu-
ment-corpus) and laterally (two or more documents, paragraphs
or sentences).
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Pero Subasic (M’97) obtained the Dipl. Eng.
and M.S. degrees from the School of Electrical
Engineering, Begrade University, Yugoslavia, and
the Dr. Eng. from Yamagata University, Japan, in
1989, 1993, and 1996, respectively
He has been with the Institute Mihajlo Pupin, Bel-
grade, Yugoslavia; Belgrade University, Yugoslavia;
Tohoku University, Japan; Yamagata University,
Japan; and, the Tokyo Insitute of Technology, Japan,
as a Faculty Member or Researcher. He is currently
with Clairvoyance, Corporation, Pittsburgh, PA,
where he has worked in text mining, navigation and visualization, data analysis,
preprocessing, including semantic Typing and Resource Management. He is the
Principal Inventor of the Fuzzy Semantic Typing framework. He has published
over 40 research papers and reports in international journals, monographs and
conferences. He is author of a book on fuzzy systems and neural networks.
Dr. Subasic is a member of Japan Society for Fuzzy Systems (ACM SIGCHI,
SOFT) and Yugoslav Society for Soft Computing and Intelligent Systems (SO-
COIS).
Alison Huettner received the Ph.D. in linguistics
from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst,
MA, in 1989.
In 1998, she joined Clairvoyance Corporation,
Pittsburgh, PA as a Project Manager working on
natural language processing (NLP). She refined the
CLARIT NLP resources and experimented with
extensions, including expanded lexical equivalences,
semantic typing, specialized affect handling, and
a prototype question-answering system; currently,
she is working with e-commerce applications. Prior
to joining Clairvoyance, she was a knowledge engineer with Carnegie Group,
Inc., and worked on a fact-extraction system and a commercial machine
translation system. She is also one of the inventors of the associated patent for
an integrated authoring and translation system.