Cross-lingual Emotion Intensity Prediction

Irean Navas Alejo, Toni Badia, Jeremy Barnes


Abstract
Emotion intensity prediction determines the degree or intensity of an emotion that the author expresses in a text, extending previous categorical approaches to emotion detection. While most previous work on this topic has concentrated on English texts, other languages would also benefit from fine-grained emotion classification, preferably without having to recreate the amount of annotated data available in English in each new language. Consequently, we explore cross-lingual transfer approaches for fine-grained emotion detection in Spanish and Catalan tweets. To this end we annotate a test set of Spanish and Catalan tweets using Best-Worst scaling. We compare six cross-lingual approaches, e.g., machine translation and cross-lingual embeddings, which have varying requirements for parallel data – from millions of parallel sentences to completely unsupervised. The results show that on this data, methods with low parallel-data requirements perform surprisingly better than methods that use more parallel data, which we explain through an in-depth error analysis. We make the dataset and the code available at https://github.com/jerbarnes/fine-grained_cross-lingual_emotion.
Anthology ID:
2020.peoples-1.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Modeling of People's Opinions, Personality, and Emotion's in Social Media
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Malvina Nissim, Viviana Patti, Barbara Plank, Esin Durmus
Venue:
PEOPLES
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
140–152
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.peoples-1.14
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Irean Navas Alejo, Toni Badia, and Jeremy Barnes. 2020. Cross-lingual Emotion Intensity Prediction. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Modeling of People's Opinions, Personality, and Emotion's in Social Media, pages 140–152, Barcelona, Spain (Online). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cross-lingual Emotion Intensity Prediction (Navas Alejo et al., PEOPLES 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.peoples-1.14.pdf
Code
 jbarnesspain/fine-grained_cross-lingual_emotion +  additional community code