Emotion and Sentiment in Social and Expressive Media: Introduction to the special issue

Abstract

[EN] Social and expressive media represent a challenge and a push forward for research on emotion and sentiment analysis. The advent of social media has brought about new paradigms of interaction that foster first-person engagement and crowdsourced contents: the subjective dimension moves to the foreground, opening the way to the emergence of an affective component within a dynamic corpus of digitized contents created and enriched by the users. Expressive media, which play a key role in fields related to creativity, such as figurative arts, music or drama, gather multimedia contents into online social environments, by joining the social dimension with the aims of artistic creation and self-expression. Artistic creation and performance seem to be a very interesting testbed for cross-validating and possibly integrating approaches, models and tools for automatically analyzing emotion and sentiment. In fact, in such contexts the social and affective dimensions (emotions and feelings) naturally emerge (Silvia, 2005), think for instance of the visitors’ feedback to a real or virtual art exhibition, or of the audience–performance interaction (...) In light of these considerations, this special issue focuses on the presentation and discussion of a set of novel computational approaches to the analysis of emotion and sentiment in social and expressive media.