Japanese Dictionary for Sentiment Analysis of Counselling Text

Chat-based counselling has become increasingly popular in the era of telecommunication. The need for accessible therapy has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Given its text-based nature, chat-based counselling provides an opportunity for machine-based analysis. It even has the potential to provide machine-based counselling services. However, the informational resources for machine-based analysis and interaction are rather scarce especially in a Japanese-language context. We created a Japanese dictionary for sentiment analysis, using a technique via machine-based text analysis, tailored for counselling related text. It includes 2389 words that were frequently used in chat-based counselling corpora. The following attributes were included for each word: (1) valence rating by the general public, (2) valence rating by clinical psychologists, (3) emotionality, and (4) body-relatedness.