Findings of WASSA 2023 Shared Task on Empathy, Emotion and Personality Detection in Conversation and Reactions to News Articles

Valentin Barriere, João Sedoc, Shabnam Tafreshi, Salvatore Giorgi


Abstract
This paper presents the results of the WASSA 2023 shared task on predicting empathy, emotion, and personality in conversations and reactions to news articles. Participating teams were given access to a new dataset from Omitaomu et al. (2022) comprising empathic and emotional reactions to news articles. The dataset included formal and informal text, self-report data, and third-party annotations. Specifically, the dataset contained news articles (where harm is done to a person, group, or other) and crowd-sourced essays written in reaction to the article. After reacting via essays, crowd workers engaged in conversations about the news articles. Finally, the crowd workers self-reported their empathic concern and distress, personality (using the Big Five), and multi-dimensional empathy (via the Interpersonal Reactivity Index). A third-party annotated both the conversational turns (for empathy, emotion polarity, and emotion intensity) and essays (for multi-label emotions). Thus, the dataset contained outcomes (self-reported or third-party annotated) at the turn level (within conversations) and the essay level. Participation was encouraged in five tracks: (i) predicting turn-level empathy, emotion polarity, and emotion intensity in conversations, (ii) predicting state empathy and distress scores, (iii) predicting emotion categories, (iv) predicting personality, and (v) predicting multi-dimensional trait empathy. In total, 21 teams participated in the shared task. We summarize the methods and resources used by the participating teams.
Anthology ID:
2023.wassa-1.44
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:
511–525
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.44
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.wassa-1.44
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Valentin Barriere, João Sedoc, Shabnam Tafreshi, and Salvatore Giorgi. 2023. Findings of WASSA 2023 Shared Task on Empathy, Emotion and Personality Detection in Conversation and Reactions to News Articles. In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis, pages 511–525, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Findings of WASSA 2023 Shared Task on Empathy, Emotion and Personality Detection in Conversation and Reactions to News Articles (Barriere et al., WASSA 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.44.pdf