Understanding expressions of emotions in support forums has considerable value and NLP methods are key to automating this. Many approaches understandably use subjective categories which are more finegrained than a straightforward polaritybased spectrum. However, the definition of such categories is non-trivial and, in fact, we argue for a need to incorporate communicative elements even beyond subjectivity. To support our position, we report experiments on a sentiment-labelled corpus of posts taken from a medical support forum. We argue that not only is a more fine-grained approach to text analysis important, but simultaneously recognising the social function behind affective expressions enable a more accurate and valuable level of understanding.

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