My Heart Skipped a Beat! Recognizing Expressions of Embodied Emotion in Natural Language

Yuan Zhuang, Tianyu Jiang, Ellen Riloff


Abstract
Humans frequently experience emotions. When emotions arise, they affect not only our mental state but can also change our physical state. For example, we often open our eyes wide when we are surprised, or clap our hands when we feel excited. Physical manifestations of emotions are referred to as embodied emotion in the psychology literature. From an NLP perspective, recognizing descriptions of physical movements or physiological responses associated with emotions is a type of implicit emotion recognition. Our work introduces a new task of recognizing expressions of embodied emotion in natural language. We create a dataset of sentences that contains 7,300 body part mentions with human annotations for embodied emotion. We develop a classification model for this task and present two methods to acquire weakly labeled instances of embodied emotion by extracting emotional manner expressions and by prompting a language model. Our experiments show that the weakly labeled data can train an effective classification model without gold data, and can also improve performance when combined with gold data. Our dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/yyzhuang1991/Embodied-Emotions.
Anthology ID:
2024.naacl-long.193
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3525–3537
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.193
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuan Zhuang, Tianyu Jiang, and Ellen Riloff. 2024. My Heart Skipped a Beat! Recognizing Expressions of Embodied Emotion in Natural Language. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3525–3537, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
My Heart Skipped a Beat! Recognizing Expressions of Embodied Emotion in Natural Language (Zhuang et al., NAACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.193.pdf
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