Annotation of Emotion Carriers in Personal Narratives

Aniruddha Tammewar, Alessandra Cervone, Eva-Maria Messner, Giuseppe Riccardi


Abstract
We are interested in the problem of understanding personal narratives (PN) - spoken or written - recollections of facts, events, and thoughts. For PNs, we define emotion carriers as the speech or text segments that best explain the emotional state of the narrator. Such segments may span from single to multiple words, containing for example verb or noun phrases. Advanced automatic understanding of PNs requires not only the prediction of the narrator’s emotional state but also to identify which events (e.g. the loss of a relative or the visit of grandpa) or people (e.g. the old group of high school mates) carry the emotion manifested during the personal recollection. This work proposes and evaluates an annotation model for identifying emotion carriers in spoken personal narratives. Compared to other text genres such as news and microblogs, spoken PNs are particularly challenging because a narrative is usually unstructured, involving multiple sub-events and characters as well as thoughts and associated emotions perceived by the narrator. In this work, we experiment with annotating emotion carriers in speech transcriptions from the Ulm State-of-Mind in Speech (USoMS) corpus, a dataset of PNs in German. We believe this resource could be used for experiments in the automatic extraction of emotion carriers from PN, a task that could provide further advancements in narrative understanding.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.189
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
1517–1525
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.189
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aniruddha Tammewar, Alessandra Cervone, Eva-Maria Messner, and Giuseppe Riccardi. 2020. Annotation of Emotion Carriers in Personal Narratives. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 1517–1525, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Annotation of Emotion Carriers in Personal Narratives (Tammewar et al., LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.189.pdf
Data
ECE