BEmoC: A Corpus for Identifying Emotion in Bengali Texts

Emotion classification in text has growing interest among NLP experts due to the enormous availability of people’s emotions and its emergence on various Web 2.0 applications/services. Emotion classification in the Bengali texts is also gradually being considered as an important task for sports, e-commerce, entertainments, and security applications. However, It is a very critical task to develop an automatic emotion classification system for low-resource languages such as, Bengali. Scarcity of resources and deficiency of benchmark corpora make the task more complicated. Thus, the development of a benchmark corpus is the prerequisite to develop an emotion classifier for Bengali texts. This paper describes the development of an emotional corpus (hereafter called ‘BEmoC’) for classifying six emotions in Bengali texts. The corpus development process consists of four key steps: data crawling, pre-processing, labelling, and verification. A total of 7000 texts are labelled into six basic emotion categories such as anger, fear, surprise, sadness, joy, and disgust, respectively. Dataset evaluation with 0.969 Cohen’s κ score indicates the close agreement between the corpus annotators and the expert. The analysis of evaluation also represents that the distribution of emotion words obeys Zipf’s law. Moreover, the results of BEmoC analysis shown in terms of coding reliability, emotion density, and most frequent emotion words, respectively.