One of the biggest hurdles for the effective analysis of data collected on social platforms is the need for deeper insights on the content and meaning of this data. Emotion annotation can bring new perspectives on this issue and can enable the identification of content–specific features. This study aims at investigating the ways in which variation in online content can be explored through emotion annotation and corpus-based analysis. The paper describes the emotion annotation of three data sets in French composed of extremist, sexist and hateful messages respectively. To this end, first a fine-grained, corpus annotation scheme was used to annotate the data sets and then several empirical studies were carried out to characterize the content in the light of emotional categories. Results suggest that emotion annotations can provide new insights for online content analysis and stronger empirical background for automatic content detection.

This paper examines the role of emotion annotations to characterize extremist content released on social platforms. The analysis of extremist content is important to identify user emotions towards some extremist ideas and to highlight the root cause of where emotions and extremist attitudes merge together. To address these issues our methodology combines knowledge from sociological and linguistic annotations to explore French extremist content collected online. For emotion linguistic analysis, the solution presented in this paper relies on a complex linguistic annotation scheme. The scheme was used to annotate extremist text corpora in French. Data sets were collected online by following semi-automatic procedures for content selection and validation. The paper describes the integrated annotation scheme, the annotation protocol that was set-up for French corpora annotation and the results, e.g. agreement measures and remarks on annotation disagreements. The aim of this work is twofold: first, to provide a characterization of extremist contents; second, to validate the annotation scheme and to test its capacity to capture and describe various aspects of emotions.