Modeling Label Semantics for Predicting Emotional Reactions

Radhika Gaonkar, Heeyoung Kwon, Mohaddeseh Bastan, Niranjan Balasubramanian, Nathanael Chambers


Abstract
Predicting how events induce emotions in the characters of a story is typically seen as a standard multi-label classification task, which usually treats labels as anonymous classes to predict. They ignore information that may be conveyed by the emotion labels themselves. We propose that the semantics of emotion labels can guide a model’s attention when representing the input story. Further, we observe that the emotions evoked by an event are often related: an event that evokes joy is unlikely to also evoke sadness. In this work, we explicitly model label classes via label embeddings, and add mechanisms that track label-label correlations both during training and inference. We also introduce a new semi-supervision strategy that regularizes for the correlations on unlabeled data. Our empirical evaluations show that modeling label semantics yields consistent benefits, and we advance the state-of-the-art on an emotion inference task.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.426
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4687–4692
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.426
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.426
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Radhika Gaonkar, Heeyoung Kwon, Mohaddeseh Bastan, Niranjan Balasubramanian, and Nathanael Chambers. 2020. Modeling Label Semantics for Predicting Emotional Reactions. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 4687–4692, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Modeling Label Semantics for Predicting Emotional Reactions (Gaonkar et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.426.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929370
Code
 StonyBrookNLP/emotion-label-semantics
Data
ROCStories