Emotion ontologies have been developed to capture affect, a concept that encompasses discrete emotions and feelings, especially for research on sentiment analysis, which analyzes a customer's attitude towards a company or a product. However, there have been limited efforts to adapt and employ these ontologies. This research surveys and synthesizes emotion ontology studies to develop a Framework of Emotion Ontologies that can be used to help a user select or design an appropriate emotion ontology to support sentiment analysis and increase the user's understanding of the roles of affect, context, and behavioral information with respect to sentiment. The framework, which is derived from research on emotion ontologies, psychology, and sentiment analysis, classifies emotion ontologies as discrete emotion or one of two hybrid ontologies that are combinations of the discrete, dimensional, or componential process emotion paradigms. To illustrate its usefulness, the framework is applied to the development of an emotion ontology for a sentiment analysis application.

Sentiment analysis is used to mine text data from many sources, including blogs, support forums, and social media, in order to extract customers’ opinions and attitudes. The results can be used to make important assessments about a customer’s attitude toward a company and if and how a company should respond. However, much research on sentiment analysis uses simple classification, where the polarity of a text that is mined is classified as positive, negative, or neutral. This research creates an ontology of emotion process to support sentiment analysis, with an emphasis on obtaining a more fine-grained assessment of sentiment than polarity. The ontology is grounded in a theory of emotion process and consists of concepts that capture the generation of emotion all the way from the occurrence of an event to the resulting behaviors of the person expressing the sentiment. It includes two lexicons: one for affect and one for appraisal. The ontology is applied to posts obtained from customer support forums of large companies to show its applicability in a multilevel evaluation. Doing so provides an example of a complete ontology assessment effort.