Research note: Examining gender emotional differences in Web forum communication

Web 2.0 has enabled and fostered Internet users to share and discuss their opinions and ideas online. Thus, a large amount of opinion-rich content has been generated. With more and more women starting to participate in online communications, questions regarding gender emotional differences in Web 2.0 communication platform have been raised. However, few studies have systematically examined such differences. Motivated to address this gap, we have developed an advanced and generic framework to automatically analyze gender emotional differences in social media. Algorithms are developed and embedded in the framework to conduct analyses in different granularity levels, including sentence level, phrase level, and word level. To demonstrate the proposed research framework, an empirical experiment is conducted on a large Web forum. The analysis results indicate that women are more likely to express their opinions subjectively than men (based on sentence-level analysis), and they are more likely to express both positive and negative emotions (based on phrase-level and word-level analyses).