Transformer-based Prediction of Emotional Reactions to Online Social Network Posts

Irene Benedetto, Moreno La Quatra, Luca Cagliero, Luca Vassio, Martino Trevisan


Abstract
Emotional reactions to Online Social Network posts have recently gained importance in the study of the online ecosystem. Prior to post publication, the number of received reactions can be predicted based on either the textual content of the post or the related metadata. However, existing approaches suffer from both the lack of semantic-aware language understanding models and the limited explainability of the prediction models. To overcome these issues, we present a new transformer-based method to predict the number of emotional reactions of different types to social posts. It leverages the attention mechanism to capture arbitrary semantic textual relations neglected by prior works. Furthermore, it also provides end-users with textual explanations of the predictions. The results achieved on a large collection of Facebook posts confirm the applicability of the presented methodology.
Anthology ID:
2023.wassa-1.31
Volume:
Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Jeremy Barnes, Orphée De Clercq, Roman Klinger
Venue:
WASSA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
354–364
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.31
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.wassa-1.31
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Irene Benedetto, Moreno La Quatra, Luca Cagliero, Luca Vassio, and Martino Trevisan. 2023. Transformer-based Prediction of Emotional Reactions to Online Social Network Posts. In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis, pages 354–364, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Transformer-based Prediction of Emotional Reactions to Online Social Network Posts (Benedetto et al., WASSA 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.31.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.31.mp4