Dealing with Controversy: An Emotion and Coping Strategy Corpus Based on Role Playing

Enrica Troiano, Sofie Labat, Marco Stranisci, Rossana Damiano, Viviana Patti, Roman Klinger


Abstract
There is a mismatch between psychological and computational studies on emotions. Psychological research aims at explaining and documenting internal mechanisms of these phenomena, while computational work often simplifies them into labels. Many emotion fundamentals remain under-explored in natural language processing, particularly how emotions develop and how people cope with them. To help reduce this gap, we follow theories on coping, and treat emotions as strategies to cope with salient situations (i.e., how people deal with emotion-eliciting events). This approach allows us to investigate the link between emotions and behavior, which also emerges in language. We introduce the task of coping identification, together with a corpus to do so, constructed via role-playing. We find that coping strategies realize in text even though they are challenging to recognize, both for humans and automatic systems trained and prompted on the same task. We thus open up a promising research direction to enhance the capability of models to better capture emotion mechanisms from text.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.89
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1634–1658
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.89
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Enrica Troiano, Sofie Labat, Marco Stranisci, Rossana Damiano, Viviana Patti, and Roman Klinger. 2024. Dealing with Controversy: An Emotion and Coping Strategy Corpus Based on Role Playing. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 1634–1658, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Dealing with Controversy: An Emotion and Coping Strategy Corpus Based on Role Playing (Troiano et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.89.pdf