17 research outputs found
Emotion Embeddings \unicode{x2014} Learning Stable and Homogeneous Abstractions from Heterogeneous Affective Datasets
Human emotion is expressed in many communication modalities and media formats
and so their computational study is equally diversified into natural language
processing, audio signal analysis, computer vision, etc. Similarly, the large
variety of representation formats used in previous research to describe
emotions (polarity scales, basic emotion categories, dimensional approaches,
appraisal theory, etc.) have led to an ever proliferating diversity of
datasets, predictive models, and software tools for emotion analysis. Because
of these two distinct types of heterogeneity, at the expressional and
representational level, there is a dire need to unify previous work on
increasingly diverging data and label types. This article presents such a
unifying computational model. We propose a training procedure that learns a
shared latent representation for emotions, so-called emotion embeddings,
independent of different natural languages, communication modalities, media or
representation label formats, and even disparate model architectures.
Experiments on a wide range of heterogeneous affective datasets indicate that
this approach yields the desired interoperability for the sake of reusability,
interpretability and flexibility, without penalizing prediction quality. Code
and data are archived under https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7405327 .Comment: 18 pages, 6 figure
Modeling Empathy and Distress in Reaction to News Stories
Computational detection and understanding of empathy is an important factor
in advancing human-computer interaction. Yet to date, text-based empathy
prediction has the following major limitations: It underestimates the
psychological complexity of the phenomenon, adheres to a weak notion of ground
truth where empathic states are ascribed by third parties, and lacks a shared
corpus. In contrast, this contribution presents the first publicly available
gold standard for empathy prediction. It is constructed using a novel
annotation methodology which reliably captures empathy assessments by the
writer of a statement using multi-item scales. This is also the first
computational work distinguishing between multiple forms of empathy, empathic
concern, and personal distress, as recognized throughout psychology. Finally,
we present experimental results for three different predictive models, of which
a CNN performs the best.Comment: To appear at EMNLP 201