WASSA 2021 Shared Task: Predicting Empathy and Emotion in Reaction to News Stories

Shabnam Tafreshi, Orphee De Clercq, Valentin Barriere, Sven Buechel, João Sedoc, Alexandra Balahur


Abstract
This paper presents the results that were obtained from the WASSA 2021 shared task on predicting empathy and emotions. The participants were given access to a dataset comprising empathic reactions to news stories where harm is done to a person, group, or other. These reactions consist of essays, Batson empathic concern, and personal distress scores, and the dataset was further extended with news articles, person-level demographic information (age, gender, ethnicity, income, education level), and personality information. Additionally, emotion labels, namely Ekman’s six basic emotions, were added to the essays at both the document and sentence level. Participation was encouraged in two tracks: predicting empathy and predicting emotion categories. In total five teams participated in the shared task. We summarize the methods and resources used by the participating teams.
Anthology ID:
2021.wassa-1.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Orphee De Clercq, Alexandra Balahur, Joao Sedoc, Valentin Barriere, Shabnam Tafreshi, Sven Buechel, Veronique Hoste
Venue:
WASSA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
92–104
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wassa-1.10
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shabnam Tafreshi, Orphee De Clercq, Valentin Barriere, Sven Buechel, João Sedoc, and Alexandra Balahur. 2021. WASSA 2021 Shared Task: Predicting Empathy and Emotion in Reaction to News Stories. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis, pages 92–104, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
WASSA 2021 Shared Task: Predicting Empathy and Emotion in Reaction to News Stories (Tafreshi et al., WASSA 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wassa-1.10.pdf
Data
CARERGoEmotions