Emotional Metaphors for Emotion Recognition
in Chine Text
Xiaoxi Huang1, Yun Yang2, and Changle Zhou1,2
1 College of Computer Science, Zhejiang University, 310027, P.R. China
itshere@
2 Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Xiamen University, 361005, P.R. China
, dozero@
Abstract. The affections of a person can be expresd by non-verbal methods
such as facial expressions, gestures, postures and expressions from eyes. While
implicit language like emotional metaphor is also an important way to express
one’s affections. Different kinds of emotional metaphors in Chine and their
characteristics are propod, including happiness, sadness, anger, fear and sur-
pri. Experiment result shows the characteristics of Chine emotional meta-
phors are reasonable. The importance of emotional metaphors in emotion rec-
ognition is also discusd.
1 Introduction
The latest scientific findings have indicated that emotions lead an important role in human intelligence, such as decision-making, inter-communication and more. As Marvin Minsky said in his “the society of mind”[1], “The question is not whether in-telligent machines can have any emotions, but whether machines can be intelligent without any emotions”, if we want computers to be vividly intelligent and to interact with us more naturally and socially, we should let the computers have the abilities to recognize, understand, and even to express emotions[2].
To date, much of the work studying affective computing has concentrated on facial expressions, gestures, postures, and properties of speech. Although much emotional expression is conveyed in physiological features or speech’s acoustic realizations, it is equally important to trace into how it is c
onveyed in the linguistic content[3]. In written language, the interpretation of emotional states is more complex. It can be referred to directly, for instance, “I am angry”, but usually it is not explicit and the reader or hearer must infer it. The cues for inferring it can come from grammatical structures, vocabu-lary forms and verbal inflections, etc. Metaphor is uful for abstract concepts, and the function of a metaphor is to express, clarify or explain some concept through a better understood, and generally concrete, concept. For example, in metaphor “Time is money”, the concept “time” is an abstract concept, while “money” is a concrete con-cept. Since emotions are abstract concepts, it is natural that metaphor is an effective method for expressing emotion. In fact, one of the major functions of metaphor is to express emotion[4, 5]. Through metaphor, an emotion can be related to some other concept, which tends to make it more concrete.
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In this paper, the different emotional metaphors and the characteristics of Chine emotional metaphor are discusd. We think that emotional metaphor plays an impor-tant role in emotion recognition for text. Taking emotional metaphor into account will make up the insufficiency of merely focusing on emotion keywords.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes some backgrounds about metaphors and emotional metaphor. Section 3 discuss the different kinds of emotional metaphor according to the source domain. And then, the characteristics of five primary emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear and surpri are propod in ction 4. Related works are introduced in ction 5. At last, the conclusions and future work are given in ction 6.
2 Metaphors and Emotional Metaphor
The study for metaphor can trace back to the era of Aristotle. Since then, the traditional view to metaphor is that metaphorical language is decorative and condary, while literal language is the primary. However, along with the development of metaphor re-arch, rearchers have realized that metaphor is prevalent in natural language, and is the center of language and human thinking[6]. Lakoff and Johnson propod that metaphor is a means of understanding one domain of experience, called the source domain, in terms of the conceptual structure of another domain, called the target do-main. Their study indicates that the cognitive system of human itlf is a metaphorical system. Metaphor is not merely decoration of language, but also an important method of human thinking and cognition[6].
Many linguists have rearched about emotional metaphor in English. The results indicate that the emotions of human are generally expresd through metaphors about body perceptions in a way[6-8]. Some rearchers have compared the emotional metaphors between Chine and English[7, 8]. Yu Ning[8] discusd the metaphorical expressions about Chine emotional concept “愤怒”(anger) and “喜悦”(happy). He demonstrates that the metaphorical schemas of emotions in Chine is the same to tho in English, which are “ANGER IS HEAT” and “HAPPY IS UP”. There are two derived conceptual metaphor for this schema, namely, “anger is fire” and “anger is a hot fluid/gas in a container”. Here, bad on the rearch result on emotional metaphors from linguists, through analyzing different kind of emotional metaphors, we divide emotional metaphors into following kinds in ction 3.
3 Kinds of Emotional Metaphor
In this ction, we will discuss 3 types of emotional metaphors, namely, orientational metaphors, body metaphors and nature metaphors. The main standard is the source domain of emotional metaphors.
3.1 Orientational Metaphors
In Lakoff’s conceptual metaphor theory, emotions are generally understood in terms of orientational metaphors, such as “HAPPY IS UP”, “SAD IS DOWN”. From the root metaphors, we can derive many emotional metaphors as follows.
Emotional Metaphors for Emotion Recognition in Chine Text 321 (1) 他 今天 情绪 看起来 很高/低落.
He ems in high/low spirits today.
(2) 老师高度评价了他的成果.
The teacher remarked highly of his achievements.
(3) 战士们士气高昂/低落.
The soldiers were elated/downcast.
(4) 别看低他的本领.
Don’t look down upon him.
Example (1)-(3) us the orientational concept “high” (“low”) to express one’s emotion about happiness (sadness). In (4), the orientational concept “down” is ud to express the agent’s scorn emotion.
3.2 Body Metaphors
Emotions are generally expresd through the physiological state of human body[6, 9]. Rearchers have investigated different languages such as Chine and English, and have found that many emotional metaphors are in forms of mapping the physiological changes into the emotion domain[6, 7, 10]. In ction 1, we have introduced that most of existing emotion recognition methods are through facial expressions, gestures, postures and physiological features. When it comes to written language, it is also a good approach to recognize emotions through the words which describing the physiological features of the agent. In body metaphors, the states of eyebrows, facial colors, hairs and hearts are usually ud to express different emotions.
3.2.1 Eyes and Brows
In Chine, there are many methods to express emotions through eyes and brows. We can find the phenomena from many Chine idioms. For instance, “眉飞色舞”(brows flying and eyes danci
ng), “喜上眉梢”(joys on the brows), “舒眉展眼”(be all smiles) and “眉开眼笑”(brows expanding and eyes smiling) all express the happy feelings; both “愁眉苦脸” and “眉头紧锁” mean sadness; “横眉” and “皱眉” mean anger and worry respectively.
3.2.2 Facial Colors
Facial color is an effective source feature reflecting agent’s emotion. In written lan-guage, using facial colors to describe emotion is ubiquitous. For examples, “脸色苍白”(pale or white) in Chine is generally ud to express “fear” or “fright”; “红晕”(flush) is ud for “shame” or “embarrassment”; “急红了脸”(red with anger) and “面红耳赤”(be flushed) mean “anger”. Sometimes, red is also ud to express “happy”, such as “红光满面”(in ruddy health).
3.2.3 Heart
Heart also plays an important role in expressing human emotion, especially in written text, when characterizing people’s mental activities. We may u “心碎”(heart broken) and “心如刀割”(to feel as if a knife were piercing one's heart) to express the extremity of sadness or depression, heartbroken,“心花怒放”(a flower blossoms in the heart) and
322 X. Huang, Y. Yang, and C. Zhou
“心旷神怡”(relaxed and happy, cool) are generally ud to convey the happiness, While “心惊肉跳” and “心惊胆战” are ud to express fear, which means that the heart is shaking with fear.
3.2.4 Behaviors
Ordinarily, emotions can also be expresd through behaviors. If someone is dancing and skipping with joy, then he may be happy. If someone is grinding one’s teeth, he may be angry. “hair stands on end” means fear, and that “weeping” means sadness. (5) 孩子们拿到礼物后, 都欢蹦乱跳起来.
The children were dancing and skipping with joy, after they got their prents. (6) 听了这个故事, 大家都觉得毛骨悚然.
When having heard the story, we all felt hair stands on end.
(7) 得知这个消息后, 她低下了头默默流泪.
When heard of the message, she crouched and wept.
(8) 遇到不人道的事情, 大家都咬牙切齿.
We all gnash for inhumanity.
3.3 Nature Metaphors
The nature is the clost thing human can feel directly. In traditional culture of China, “red” is one of the symbols for happy events such as weddings, festivals etc., and “black” is ud to express sadness such as bereavements. In English, “blue” reprents sadness, but “gray” is ud in Chine for sadness, such as (9).
(9) 今天的心情就像这天空一样, 是灰色的.
The feeling is gray, like the color of today’s sky.
Goatly[4] has pointed out that most of the language for emotion or emotional states come from the words for weather or weather changes.
(10) 她脸上带着灿烂的笑容.
There are sunny smiles on her face.
(11) 刚才还是晴空万里, 现在就变为乌云密布, 女人的心真难琢磨.
Sun shining a moment ago has turned heavily cloudy, it’s so hard to tell women’s mood.
(12) 老板突然来了一个晴天霹雳, 大家都沉默了.
Suddenly, the boss got thunderstorm and we all kept silent.
(13) 她对我大发雷霆.
She blew up at me.
In (10), the term “sunny” which comes from weather domain is ud as a modifier for smile, to express the happiness of the subject. In (11) to (13), “乌云密布”(cloudy), “晴天霹雳”(a lightning bolt) and “雷霆”(thunder) all reprent anger.
In Lakoff’s conceptual metaphor theory, “ANGER IS FIRE” is a famous conceptual metaphor. In Chine, anger is usually described as gas[8]. For examples,
(14) 他在发脾气
He is losing control of himlf.
(15)别惹他发火
Don’t make him get angry.
Emotional Metaphors for Emotion Recognition in Chine Text 323 4 Characteristics of Chine Emotional Metaphor
In this ction, we summarize the characteristics of Chine emotional metaphor, bad on ction 3. We only consider the five primary emotions of happiness, sadness, anger, fear and surpri. The result is in table 1. The left column reprents emotions, and the top row reprents source domains of emotional metaphors. The cell contents are the features of source domains ud to describe emotions.
Table 1. Characteristics of Chine emotional metaphor for 5 primary emotions Body Nature Emotion Orien-
tation Eyebrow Facial color
Heart Behavior Color Weather
Happy Up High Open Free Flush, Red Open Dancing Singing Flying Jumping
Smiling
Red Sunny
Spring
Warm
Sad Down Low Tighten Lour Cyan White Broken Pain Crouch, Weeping Black White Gray Rainy
Cloudy
Autumn
Dark
Angry Up Frown, Glare Red Gnash Fist
Stomp
Long-face
Red Fire
Storm Thunder Summer Fear Clo Pale White Shake Tighten Shiver Breathe-hurry
White Thunder
Light
Cold Surpri Stare Gapemout-hed
To verify the characteristics summarized above, we collect 100 Chine emotional metaphors from a large corpus. According to the characteristics in table 1, the distri-bution of emotions in this collection is 25% for happiness, 25% for sadness, 25% for anger, 15% for fear, and 10% for surpri. 30 subjects who are undergraduate students from Xiamen University are given the forms. Every form consists of a ntence of Chine emotional metaphors; the subjects should lect one and only one of the pri-mary emotions or other for the ntence. 24 out of the 30 subjects returned them. Then we calculate the values of a ntence as a particular emotion with the following formula:
(,)
(,)num i k v i k S = (1)
Where, (,)v i k means the value of ntence i as emotion k (that is happiness, sadness, anger, fear or surpri), (,)num i k is the total number of subjects that vote ntence i to emotion k . S is the number of subjects, here S=24. Obviously, v is range from 0 to 1.
