Emotion Sensitive News Agent: An Approach Towards User Centric Emotion Sensing from the News

This paper describes a character-based system called "Emotion Sensitive News Agent" (ESNA). ESNA is been developed as a news aggregator to fetch news from different news sources chosen by a user, and to categorize the themes of the news into eight emotion types. A small user study indicates that the system is conceived as intelligent and interesting as an affective interface. ESNA exemplifies a recent research agenda that aims at recognizing affective information conveyed through texts. News is an interesting application domain where user may have marked attitudes to certain events or entities reported about. Different approaches have already been employed to "sense" emotion from text. The novelty of our approach is twofold: affective information conveyed through text is analyzed (1) by considering the cognitive and appraisal structure of emotions, and (2) by taking into account user preferences.