We are united in how emotions are central to shaping our experiences; yet, individuals differ greatly in how we each identify, categorize, and express emotions. In psychology, variation in the ability of individuals to differentiate between emotion concepts is called emotion granularity (determined through self-reports of one’s emotions). High emotion granularity has been linked with better mental and physical health; whereas low emotion granularity has been linked with maladaptive emotion regulation strategies and poor health outcomes. In this work, we propose computational measures of emotion granularity derived from temporally-ordered speaker utterances in social media (in lieu of self reports that suffer from various biases). We then investigate the effectiveness of such text-derived measures of emotion granularity in functioning as markers of various mental health conditions (MHCs). We establish baseline measures of emotion granularity derived from textual utterances, and show that, at an aggregate level, emotion granularities are significantly lower for people self-reporting as having an MHC than for the control population. This paves the way towards a better understanding of the MHCs, and specifically the role emotions play in our well-being.

Emotion arcs capture how an individual (or a population) feels over time. They are widely used in industry and research; however, there is little work on evaluating the automatically generated arcs. This is because of the difficulty of establishing the true (gold) emotion arc. Our work, for the first time, systematically and quantitatively evaluates automatically generated emotion arcs. We also compare two common ways of generating emotion arcs: Machine-Learning (ML) models and Lexicon-Only (LexO) methods. By running experiments on 18 diverse datasets in 9 languages, we show that despite being markedly poor at instance level emotion classification, LexO methods are highly accurate at generating emotion arcs when aggregating information from hundreds of instances. We also show, through experiments on six indigenous African languages, as well as Arabic, and Spanish, that automatic translations of English emotion lexicons can be used to generate high-quality emotion arcs in less-resource languages. This opens up avenues for work on emotions in languages from around the world; which is crucial for commerce, public policy, and health research in service of speakers often left behind. Code and resources: https://github.com/dteodore/EmotionArcs

Research in psychopathology has shown that, at an aggregate level, the patterns of emotional change over time—emotion dynamics—are indicators of one’s mental health. One’s patterns of emotion change have traditionally been determined through self-reports of emotions; however, there are known issues with accuracy, bias, and convenience. Recent approaches to determining emotion dynamics from one’s everyday utterances, addresses many of these concerns, but it is not yet known whether these measures of utterance emotion dynamics (UED) correlate with mental health diagnoses. Here, for the first time, we study the relationship between tweet emotion dynamics and mental health disorders. We find that each of the UED metrics studied varied by the user’s self-disclosed diagnosis. For example: average valence was significantly higher (i.e., more positive text) in the control group compared to users with ADHD, MDD, and PTSD. Valence variability was significantly lower in the control group compared to ADHD, depression, bipolar disorder, MDD, PTSD, and OCD but not PPD. Rise and recovery rates of valence also exhibited significant differences from the control. This work provides important early evidence for how linguistic cues pertaining to emotion dynamics can play a crucial role as biosocial markers for mental illnesses and aid in the understanding, diagnosis, and management of mental health disorders.

Emerging psychopathology studies are showing that patterns of changes in emotional state — emotion dynamics — are associated with overall well-being and mental health. More recently, there has been some work in tracking emotion dynamics through one’s utterances, allowing for data to be collected on a larger scale across time and people. However, several questions about how emotion dynamics change with age, especially in children, and when determined through children’s writing, remain unanswered. In this work, we use both a lexicon and a machine learning based approach to quantify characteristics of emotion dynamics determined from poems written by children of various ages. We show that both approaches point to similar trends: consistent increasing intensities for some emotions (e.g., anger, fear, joy, sadness, arousal, and dominance) with age and a consistent decreasing valence with age. We also find increasing emotional variability, rise rates (i.e., emotional reactivity), and recovery rates (i.e., emotional regulation) with age. These results act as a useful baselines for further research in how patterns of emotions expressed by children change with age, and their association with mental health.

We describe our two systems for the shared task on Lexical Semantic Change Discovery in Spanish. For binary change detection, we frame the task as a word sense disambiguation (WSD) problem. We derive sense frequency distributions for target words in both old and modern corpora. We assume that the word semantics have changed if a sense is observed in only one of the two corpora, or the relative change for any sense exceeds a tuned threshold. For graded change discovery, we follow the design of CIRCE (Pömsl and Lyapin, 2020) by combining both static and contextual embeddings. For contextual embeddings, we use XLM-RoBERTa instead of BERT, and train the model to predict a masked token instead of the time period. Our language-independent methods achieve results that are close to the best-performing systems in the shared task.

Plains Cree (nêhiyawêwin) is an Indigenous language that is spoken in Canada and the USA. It is the most widely spoken dialect of Cree and a morphologically complex language that is polysynthetic, highly inflective, and agglutinative. It is an extremely low resource language, with no existing corpus that is both available and prepared for supporting the development of language technologies. To support nêhiyawêwin revitalization and preservation, we developed a corpus covering diverse genres, time periods, and texts for a variety of intended audiences. The data has been verified and cleaned; it is ready for use in developing language technologies for nêhiyawêwin. The corpus includes the corresponding English phrases or audio files where available. We demonstrate the utility of the corpus through its community use and its use to build language technologies that can provide the types of support that community members have expressed are desirable. The corpus is available for public use.