We Have No Feelings, We Have Emoticons ;-)

Positive emotions have been proven to be a key factor for successful learning. In modern personalized learning environments informal learning takes a prominent role and with this the use of computer-mediated communication. Communication data, like for example chat logs, can be harvested for sentiments. Most sentiment analyses operate processing only verbal information. But the messages exchanged in text based chat also contain low key nonverbal communication. Emoticons are used to compensate the missing visual information and communicate emotions. In this paper we want to introduce a method to perform a sentiment analysis on text based chat logs relying only on emoticons to detect positive sentiment. We implemented and tested this method for the instant messenger Skype. Our first results show emoticons do indeed represent a strong indicator for detecting positivity within chat communication.