Emotion Attention to Friends on Social Networking Services

Abstract

Social networking services are an important channel for people to keep in contact nowadays. Through the messages posted by friends, the user is able to know his/ her friends' recent activities, news and emotion status. In this research, we aimed at developing a system that can screen and analyze the messages posted by friends on social networking services to know which friends need instant attention/care. The posts on Facebook Wall of a friend are filtered first to obtain the messages by the friend, excluding the posts by games or other applications. The obtained messages are then classified into one of eight categories, including six emotion categories, special events, and others. The category information of the terms in the messages is then further analyzed for the proposed attention index. After the attention indices of selected friends are decided, they are ranked by the indices. The ones with higher attention indices need the user to show his/her care in a timely manner. We have developed a Facebook application that can display the desired information in a graphical interface.