Emotion Identification for French in Written Texts: Considering Modes of Emotion Expression as a Step Towards Text Complexity Analysis

Aline Étienne, Delphine Battistelli, Gwénolé Lecorvé


Abstract
The objective of this paper is to predict (A) whether a sentence in a written text expresses an emotion, (B) the mode(s) in which the emotion is expressed, (C) whether it is basic or complex, and (D) its emotional category.One of our major contributions, in addition to a dataset and a model, is to integrate the fact that an emotion can be expressed in different modes: from a direct mode, essentially lexicalized, to a more indirect mode, where emotions will only be suggested, a mode that NLP approaches generally don’t take into account. The scope is on written texts, i.e. it does not focus on conversational or multi-modal data. In this context, modes of expression are seen as a factor towards the automatic analysis of complexity in texts.Experiments on French texts show acceptable results compared to the human annotators’ agreement to predict the mode and category, and outperforming results compared to using a large language model with in-context learning (i.e. no fine-tuning) on all tasks.Dataset and model can be downloaded on HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/TextToKids .
Anthology ID:
2024.wassa-1.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Orphée De Clercq, Valentin Barriere, Jeremy Barnes, Roman Klinger, João Sedoc, Shabnam Tafreshi
Venues:
WASSA | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
168–185
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.wassa-1.14
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aline Étienne, Delphine Battistelli, and Gwénolé Lecorvé. 2024. Emotion Identification for French in Written Texts: Considering Modes of Emotion Expression as a Step Towards Text Complexity Analysis. In Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis, pages 168–185, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Emotion Identification for French in Written Texts: Considering Modes of Emotion Expression as a Step Towards Text Complexity Analysis (Étienne et al., WASSA-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.wassa-1.14.pdf