Emotion and Sentiment Guided Paraphrasing

Justin Xie, Ameeta Agrawal


Abstract
Paraphrase generation, a.k.a. paraphrasing, is a common and important task in natural language processing. Emotional paraphrasing, which changes the emotion embodied in a piece of text while preserving its meaning, has many potential applications, including moderating online dialogues and preventing cyberbullying. We introduce a new task of fine-grained emotional paraphrasing along emotion gradients, that is, altering the emotional intensities of the paraphrases in fine-grained settings following smooth variations in affective dimensions while preserving the meaning of the original text. We reconstruct several widely used paraphrasing datasets by augmenting the input and target texts with their fine-grained emotion labels. Then, we propose a framework for emotion and sentiment guided paraphrasing by leveraging pre-trained language models for conditioned text generation. Extensive evaluation of the fine-tuned models suggests that including fine-grained emotion labels in the paraphrase task significantly improves the likelihood of obtaining high-quality paraphrases that reflect the desired emotions while achieving consistently better scores in paraphrase metrics such as BLEU, ROUGE, and METEOR.
Anthology ID:
2023.wassa-1.7
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:
58–70
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.7
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.wassa-1.7
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Justin Xie and Ameeta Agrawal. 2023. Emotion and Sentiment Guided Paraphrasing. In Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis, pages 58–70, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Emotion and Sentiment Guided Paraphrasing (Xie & Agrawal, WASSA 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.7.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.wassa-1.7.mp4