Modeling Emotional Trajectories in Written Stories Utilizing Transformers and Weakly-Supervised Learning

Lukas Christ, Shahin Amiriparian, Manuel Milling, Ilhan Aslan, Björn Schuller


Abstract
Telling stories is an integral part of human communication which can evoke emotions and influence the affective states of the audience. Automatically modeling emotional trajectories in stories has thus attracted considerable scholarly interest. However, as most existing works have been limited to unsupervised dictionary-based approaches, there is no benchmark for this task. We address this gap by introducing continuous valence and arousal labels for an existing dataset of children’s stories originally annotated with discrete emotion categories. We collect additional annotations for this data and map the categorical labels to the continuous valence and arousal space. For predicting the thus obtained emotionality signals, we fine-tune a DeBERTa model and improve upon this baseline via a weakly supervised learning approach. The best configuration achieves a Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) of .8221 for valence and .7125 for arousal on the test set, demonstrating the efficacy of our proposed approach. A detailed analysis shows the extent to which the results vary depending on factors such as the author, the individual story, or the section within the story. In addition, we uncover the weaknesses of our approach by investigating examples that prove to be difficult to predict.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.426
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7144–7159
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.426
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.426
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lukas Christ, Shahin Amiriparian, Manuel Milling, Ilhan Aslan, and Björn Schuller. 2024. Modeling Emotional Trajectories in Written Stories Utilizing Transformers and Weakly-Supervised Learning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 7144–7159, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Modeling Emotional Trajectories in Written Stories Utilizing Transformers and Weakly-Supervised Learning (Christ et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.426.pdf