The SNS Counseling and Community Support Project Has Created a Japanese Dictionary for Sentiment Analysis of Counselling Text

Nowadays, communication tools are shifting to social networking services (SNS), especially among young people. There is a need for SNS to build on the functions that psychological counseling services via telephone or e-mail have taken on. However, psychological counseling via SNS has only just begun to be introduced on a trial basis. At present, it is beginning to be recognized as a new field among professionals, and the development of systems, techniques, and theories for SNS counseling is an urgent issue.

A characteristic of SNS counseling is that it leaves a written record. Therefore, it is considered that the development of counseling support and analysis systems using natural language processing technology can facilitate the establishment of an appropriate counseling system and the development of techniques and theories.

The SNS counseling and community support project has created a Japanese Dictionary for Sentiment Analysis of Counselling Text in order to accelerate analysis using natural language processing technology.

The dictionary shows the following attributes for 2389 words that were frequently used in the SNS counseling corpora:
・Emotional valence for a word (rating 1-5 from negative to positive)
・Whether a word is related to emotion or not (rating by clinical psychologists)
・Whether a word is related to physical condition / symptoms or body parts (rating by clinical psychologists)

This dictionary was peer-reviewed and presented as a poster at the 9th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (HAI ’21).

*The Japanese Dictionary for Sentiment Analysis of Counselling Text is available on the following site for anyone to use. For details on usage and creation procedures, please see the dictionary’s page or the references.
　

Public page of the dictionary:
https://osf.io/fe7z5/
　

References:
Masataka Nakayama, Chihiro Hatanaka, Hisae Konakawa, Yuka Suzuki, Alethea H. Q. Koh, Yasushi Sugihara, and Toshio Kawai. 2021. Japanese Dictionary for Sentiment Analysis of Counselling Text. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (HAI ’21), November 09–11, 2021, Virtual Event, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5 pages.

https://doi.org/10.1145/3472307.3484663
　

Preprinted version
https://psyarxiv.com/2g6jt/

2021/12/01