Can you feel it will you tell me. Encouraging sentiment expression on the web

Abstract

In a recent trend in web communication, news outlets and blog platforms allow readers to express opinions about what they have read by choosing an associated feeling, or sentiment ex- pression. This emerging trend, fitting between liking and full text comments, has not still found the popularity it should. The thesis of this paper is that this is also due to the way the sen- timent choice is presented to the user. In order to test this hy- pothesis we have devised a pilot experiment; results confirm that a simpler way of choice increases sentiment expression and yields result that are more aligned with ground truth.