Abstract
Sentiment analysis allows the semantic evaluation of pieces of text according to the expressed sentiments and opinions. While considerable attention has been given to the polarity (positive, negative) of English words, only few studies were interested in the conveyed emotions (joy, anger, surprise, sadness, etc.) especially in other languages. In this paper, we present the elaboration and the evaluation of a new French lexicon considering both polarity and emotion. The elaboration method is based on the semi-automatic translation and expansion to synonyms of the English NRC Word Emotion Association Lexicon (NRC-EmoLex). First, online translators have been automatically queried in order to create a first version of our new French Expanded Emotion Lexicon (FEEL). Then, a human professional translator manually validated the automatically obtained entries and the associated emotions. She agreed with more than 94 % of the pre-validated entries (those found by a majority of translators) and less than 18 % of the remaining entries (those found by very few translators). This result highlights that online tools can be used to get high quality resources with low cost. Annotating a subset of terms by three different annotators shows that the associated sentiments and emotions are consistent. Finally, extensive experiments have been conducted to compare the final version of FEEL with other existing French lexicons. Various French benchmarks for polarity and emotion classifications have been used in these evaluations. Experiments have shown that FEEL obtains competitive results for polarity, and significantly better results for basic emotions.