Deep neural network models have played a critical role in sentiment analysis with promising results in the recent decade. One of the essential challenges, however, is how external sentiment knowledge can be effectively utilized. In this work, we propose a novel affection-driven approach to incorporating affective knowledge into neural network models. The affective knowledge is obtained in the form of a lexicon under the Affect Control Theory (ACT), which is represented by vectors of three-dimensional attributes in Evaluation, Potency, and Activity (EPA). The EPA vectors are mapped to an affective influence value and then integrated into Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) models to highlight affective terms. Experimental results show a consistent improvement of our approach over conventional LSTM models by 1.0% to 1.5% in accuracy on three large benchmark datasets. Evaluations across a variety of algorithms have also proven the effectiveness of leveraging affective terms for deep model enhancement.

Automatic Chinese irony detection is a challenging task, and it has a strong impact on linguistic research. However, Chinese irony detection often lacks labeled benchmark datasets. In this paper, we introduce Ciron, the first Chinese benchmark dataset available for irony detection for machine learning models. Ciron includes more than 8.7K posts, collected from Weibo, a micro blogging platform. Most importantly, Ciron is collected with no pre-conditions to ensure a much wider coverage. Evaluation on seven different machine learning classifiers proves the usefulness of Ciron as an important resource for Chinese irony detection.