Emotion Ratings: How Intensity, Annotation Confidence and Agreements are Entangled

Enrica Troiano, Sebastian Padó, Roman Klinger


Abstract
When humans judge the affective content of texts, they also implicitly assess the correctness of such judgment, that is, their confidence. We hypothesize that people’s (in)confidence that they performed well in an annotation task leads to (dis)agreements among each other. If this is true, confidence may serve as a diagnostic tool for systematic differences in annotations. To probe our assumption, we conduct a study on a subset of the Corpus of Contemporary American English, in which we ask raters to distinguish neutral sentences from emotion-bearing ones, while scoring the confidence of their answers. Confidence turns out to approximate inter-annotator disagreements. Further, we find that confidence is correlated to emotion intensity: perceiving stronger affect in text prompts annotators to more certain classification performances. This insight is relevant for modelling studies of intensity, as it opens the question wether automatic regressors or classifiers actually predict intensity, or rather human’s self-perceived confidence.
Anthology ID:
2021.wassa-1.5
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:
40–49
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wassa-1.5
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Enrica Troiano, Sebastian Padó, and Roman Klinger. 2021. Emotion Ratings: How Intensity, Annotation Confidence and Agreements are Entangled. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis, pages 40–49, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Emotion Ratings: How Intensity, Annotation Confidence and Agreements are Entangled (Troiano et al., WASSA 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wassa-1.5.pdf