MilaNLP @ WASSA: Does BERT Feel Sad When You Cry?

Tommaso Fornaciari, Federico Bianchi, Debora Nozza, Dirk Hovy


Abstract
The paper describes the MilaNLP team’s submission (Bocconi University, Milan) in the WASSA 2021 Shared Task on Empathy Detection and Emotion Classification. We focus on Track 2 - Emotion Classification - which consists of predicting the emotion of reactions to English news stories at the essay-level. We test different models based on multi-task and multi-input frameworks. The goal was to better exploit all the correlated information given in the data set. We find, though, that empathy as an auxiliary task in multi-task learning and demographic attributes as additional input provide worse performance with respect to single-task learning. While the result is competitive in terms of the competition, our results suggest that emotion and empathy are not related tasks - at least for the purpose of prediction.
Anthology ID:
2021.wassa-1.29
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:
269–273
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wassa-1.29
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tommaso Fornaciari, Federico Bianchi, Debora Nozza, and Dirk Hovy. 2021. MilaNLP @ WASSA: Does BERT Feel Sad When You Cry?. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis, pages 269–273, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MilaNLP @ WASSA: Does BERT Feel Sad When You Cry? (Fornaciari et al., WASSA 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wassa-1.29.pdf
Software:
 2021.wassa-1.29.Software.zip
Dataset:
 2021.wassa-1.29.Dataset.zip