%0 Journal Article %T Fine-Grained Emotion Detection in Suicide Notes: A Thresholding Approach to Multi-Label Classification %A Kim Luyckx %A Frederik Vaassen %A Claudia Peersman and Walter Daelemans %J Biomedical Informatics Insights %D 2012 %I %R 10.4137/BII.S8966 %X We present a system to automatically identify emotion-carrying sentences in suicide notes and to detect the specific fine-grained emotion conveyed. With this system, we competed in Track 2 of the 2011 Medical NLP Challenge,14 where the task was to distinguish between fifteen emotion labels, from guilt, sorrow, and hopelessness to hopefulness and happiness. Since a sentence can be annotated with multiple emotions, we designed a thresholding approach that enables assigning multiple labels to a single instance. We rely on the probability estimates returned by an SVM classifier and experimentally set thresholds on these probabilities. Emotion labels are assigned only if their probability exceeds a certain threshold and if the probability of the sentence being emotion-free is low enough. We show the advantages of this thresholding approach by comparing it to a na ve system that assigns only the most probable label to each test sentence, and to a system trained on emotion-carrying sentences only. %U http://www.la-press.com/fine-grained-emotion-detection-in-suicide-notes-a-thresholding-approac-article-a3021