Words play a central role in how we express ourselves. Lexicons of word–emotion associations are widely used in research and real-world applications for sentiment analysis, tracking emotions associated with products and policies, studying health disorders, tracking emotional arcs of stories, and so on. However, inappropriate and incorrect use of these lexicons can lead to not just sub-optimal results, but also inferences that are directly harmful to people. This paper brings together ideas from Affective Computing and AI Ethics to present, some of the practical and ethical considerations involved in the creation and use of emotion lexicons – best practices. The goal is to provide a comprehensive set of relevant considerations, so that readers (especially those new to work with emotions) can find relevant information in one place. We hope this work will facilitate more thoughtfulness when one is deciding on what emotions to work on, how to create an emotion lexicon, how to use an emotion lexicon, how to draw meaningful inferences, and how to judge success.

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

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 present the first Africentric SemEval Shared task, Sentiment Analysis for African Languages (AfriSenti-SemEval) - The dataset is available at https://github.com/afrisenti-semeval/afrisent-semeval-2023. AfriSenti-SemEval is a sentiment classification challenge in 14 African languages: Amharic, Algerian Arabic, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Moroccan Arabic, Mozambican Portuguese, Nigerian Pidgin, Oromo, Swahili, Tigrinya, Twi, Xitsonga, and Yorb (Muhammad et al., 2023), using data labeled with 3 sentiment classes. We present three subtasks: (1) Task A: monolingual classification, which received 44 submissions; (2) Task B: multilingual classification, which received 32 submissions; and (3) Task C: zero-shot classification, which received 34 submissions. The best performance for tasks A and B was achieved by NLNDE team with 71.31 and 75.06 weighted F1, respectively. UCAS-IIE-NLP achieved the best average score for task C with 58.15 weighted F1. We describe the various approaches adopted by the top 10 systems and their approaches.

Understanding the fundamental concepts and trends in a scientific field is crucial for keeping abreast of its continuous advancement. In this study, we propose a systematic framework for analyzing the evolution of research topics in a scientific field using causal discovery and inference techniques. We define three variables to encompass diverse facets of the evolution of research topics within NLP and utilize a causal discovery algorithm to unveil the causal connections among these variables using observational data. Subsequently, we leverage this structure to measure the intensity of these relationships. By conducting extensive experiments on the ACL Anthology corpus, we demonstrate that our framework effectively uncovers evolutionary trends and the underlying causes for a wide range of NLP research topics. Specifically, we show that tasks and methods are primary drivers of research in NLP, with datasets following, while metrics have minimal impact.

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.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is poised to substantially influence the world. However, significant progress comes hand-in-hand with substantial risks. Addressing them requires broad engagement with various fields of study. Yet, little empirical work examines the state of such engagement (past or current). In this paper, we quantify the degree of influence between 23 fields of study and NLP (on each other). We analyzed ~77k NLP papers, ~3.1m citations from NLP papers to other papers, and ~1.8m citations from other papers to NLP papers. We show that, unlike most fields, the cross-field engagement of NLP, measured by our proposed Citation Field Diversity Index (CFDI), has declined from 0.58 in 1980 to 0.31 in 2022 (an all-time low). In addition, we find that NLP has grown more insular—citing increasingly more NLP papers and having fewer papers that act as bridges between fields. NLP citations are dominated by computer science; Less than 8% of NLP citations are to linguistics, and less than 3% are to math and psychology. These findings underscore NLP’s urgent need to reflect on its engagement with various fields.

Africa is home to over 2,000 languages from over six language families and has the highest linguistic diversity among all continents. This includes 75 languages with at least one million speakers each. Yet, there is little NLP research conducted on African languages. Crucial in enabling such research is the availability of high-quality annotated datasets. In this paper, we introduce AfriSenti, a sentiment analysis benchmark that contains a total of >110,000 tweets in 14 African languages (Amharic, Algerian Arabic, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Moroccan Arabic, Mozambican Portuguese, Nigerian Pidgin, Oromo, Swahili, Tigrinya, Twi, Xitsonga, and Yoruba) from four language families. The tweets were annotated by native speakers and used in the AfriSenti-SemEval shared task (with over 200 participants, see website: https://afrisenti-semeval.github.io). We describe the data collection methodology, annotation process, and the challenges we dealt with when curating each dataset. We further report baseline experiments conducted on the AfriSenti datasets and discuss their usefulness.

Citing papers is the primary method through which modern scientific writing discusses and builds on past work. Collectively, citing a diverse set of papers (in time and area of study) is an indicator of how widely the community is reading. Yet, there is little work looking at broad temporal patterns of citation. This work systematically and empirically examines: How far back in time do we tend to go to cite papers? How has that changed over time, and what factors correlate with this citational attention/amnesia? We chose NLP as our domain of interest and analyzed approximately 71.5K papers to show and quantify several key trends in citation. Notably, around 62% of cited papers are from the immediate five years prior to publication, whereas only about 17% are more than ten years old. Furthermore, we show that the median age and age diversity of cited papers were steadily increasing from 1990 to 2014, but since then, the trend has reversed, and current NLP papers have an all-time low temporal citation diversity. Finally, we show that unlike the 1990s, the highly cited papers in the last decade were also papers with the least citation diversity, likely contributing to the intense (and arguably harmful) recency focus. Code, data, and a demo are available on the project homepage.

Recent advances in deep learning methods for natural language processing (NLP) have created new business opportunities and made NLP research critical for industry development. As one of the big players in the field of NLP, together with governments and universities, it is important to track the influence of industry on research. In this study, we seek to quantify and characterize industry presence in the NLP community over time. Using a corpus with comprehensive metadata of 78,187 NLP publications and 701 resumes of NLP publication authors, we explore the industry presence in the field since the early 90s. We find that industry presence among NLP authors has been steady before a steep increase over the past five years (180% growth from 2017 to 2022). A few companies account for most of the publications and provide funding to academic researchers through grants and internships. Our study shows that the presence and impact of the industry on natural language processing research are significant and fast-growing. This work calls for increased transparency of industry influence in the field.

The degree of semantic relatedness of two units of language has long been considered fundamental to understanding meaning. Additionally, automatically determining relatedness has many applications such as question answering and summarization. However, prior NLP work has largely focused on semantic similarity, a subset of relatedness, because of a lack of relatedness datasets. In this paper, we introduce a dataset for Semantic Textual Relatedness, STR-2022, that has 5,500 English sentence pairs manually annotated using a comparative annotation framework, resulting in fine-grained scores. We show that human intuition regarding relatedness of sentence pairs is highly reliable, with a repeat annotation correlation of 0.84. We use the dataset to explore questions on what makes sentences semantically related. We also show the utility of STR-2022 for evaluating automatic methods of sentence representation and for various downstream NLP tasks. Our dataset, data statement, and annotation questionnaire can be found at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7599667.

Several high-profile events, such as the mass testing of emotion recognition systems on vulnerable sub-populations and using question answering systems to make moral judgments, have highlighted how technology will often lead to more adverse outcomes for those that are already marginalized. At issue here are not just individual systems and datasets, but also the AI tasks themselves. In this position paper, I make a case for thinking about ethical considerations not just at the level of individual models and datasets, but also at the level of AI tasks. I will present a new form of such an effort, Ethics Sheets for AI Tasks, dedicated to fleshing out the assumptions and ethical considerations hidden in how a task is commonly framed and in the choices we make regarding the data, method, and evaluation. I will also present a template for ethics sheets with 50 ethical considerations, using the task of emotion recognition as a running example. Ethics sheets are a mechanism to engage with and document ethical considerations before building datasets and systems. Similar to survey articles, a small number of carefully created ethics sheets can serve numerous researchers and developers.

DBLP is the largest open-access repository of scientific articles on computer science and provides metadata associated with publications, authors, and venues. We retrieved more than 6 million publications from DBLP and extracted pertinent metadata (e.g., abstracts, author affiliations, citations) from the publication texts to create the DBLP Discovery Dataset (D3). D3 can be used to identify trends in research activity, productivity, focus, bias, accessibility, and impact of computer science research. We present an initial analysis focused on the volume of computer science research (e.g., number of papers, authors, research activity), trends in topics of interest, and citation patterns. Our findings show that computer science is a growing research field (15% annually), with an active and collaborative researcher community. While papers in recent years present more bibliographical entries in comparison to previous decades, the average number of citations has been declining. Investigating papers’ abstracts reveals that recent topic trends are clearly reflected in D3. Finally, we list further applications of D3 and pose supplemental research questions. The D3 dataset, our findings, and source code are publicly available for research purposes.

Over the last decade, Twitter has emerged as one of the most influential forums for social, political, and health discourse. In this paper, we introduce a massive dataset of more than 45 million geo-located tweets posted between 2015 and 2021 from US and Canada (TUSC), especially curated for natural language analysis. We also introduce Tweet Emotion Dynamics (TED) — metrics to capture patterns of emotions associated with tweets over time. We use TED and TUSC to explore the use of emotion-associated words across US and Canada; across 2019 (pre-pandemic), 2020 (the year the pandemic hit), and 2021 (the second year of the pandemic); and across individual tweeters. We show that Canadian tweets tend to have higher valence, lower arousal, and higher dominance than the US tweets. Further, we show that the COVID-19 pandemic had a marked impact on the emotional signature of tweets posted in 2020, when compared to the adjoining years. Finally, we determine metrics of TED for 170,000 tweeters to benchmark characteristics of TED metrics at an aggregate level. TUSC and the metrics for TED will enable a wide variety of research on studying how we use language to express ourselves, persuade, communicate, and influence, with particularly promising applications in public health, affective science, social science, and psychology.

The importance and pervasiveness of emotions in our lives makes affective computing a tremendously important and vibrant line of work. Systems for automatic emotion recognition (AER) and sentiment analysis can be facilitators of enormous progress (e.g., in improving public health and commerce) but also enablers of great harm (e.g., for suppressing dissidents and manipulating voters). Thus, it is imperative that the affective computing community actively engage with the ethical ramifications of their creations. In this article, I have synthesized and organized information from AI Ethics and Emotion Recognition literature to present fifty ethical considerations relevant to AER. Notably, this ethics sheet fleshes out assumptions hidden in how AER is commonly framed, and in the choices often made regarding the data, method, and evaluation. Special attention is paid to the implications of AER on privacy and social groups. Along the way, key recommendations are made for responsible AER. The objective of the ethics sheet is to facilitate and encourage more thoughtfulness on why to automate, how to automate, and how to judge success well before the building of AER systems. Additionally, the ethics sheet acts as a useful introductory document on emotion recognition (complementing survey articles).

In a fair world, people have equitable opportunities to education, to conduct scientific research, to publish, and to get credit for their work, regardless of where they live. However, it is common knowledge among researchers that a vast number of papers accepted at top NLP venues come from a handful of western countries and (lately) China; whereas, very few papers from Africa and South America get published. Similar disparities are also believed to exist for paper citation counts. In the spirit of “what we do not measure, we cannot improve”, this work asks a series of questions on the relationship between geographical location and publication success (acceptance in top NLP venues and citation impact). We first created a dataset of 70,000 papers from the ACL Anthology, extracted their meta-information, andgenerated their citation network. We then show that not only are there substantial geographical disparities in paper acceptance and citation but also that these disparities persist even when controlling for a number of variables such as venue of publication and sub-field of NLP. Further, despite some steps taken by the NLP community to improve geographical diversity, we show that the disparity in publication metrics across locations is still on an increasing trend since the early 2000s. We release our code and dataset here: https://github.com/iamjanvijay/acl-cite-net

On social media platforms, hateful and offensive language negatively impact the mental well-being of users and the participation of people from diverse backgrounds. Automatic methods to detect offensive language have largely relied on datasets with categorical labels. However, comments can vary in their degree of offensiveness. We create the first dataset of English language Reddit comments that has fine-grained, real-valued scores between -1 (maximally supportive) and 1 (maximally offensive). The dataset was annotated using Best–Worst Scaling, a form of comparative annotation that has been shown to alleviate known biases of using rating scales. We show that the method produces highly reliable offensiveness scores. Finally, we evaluate the ability of widely-used neural models to predict offensiveness scores on this new dataset.

Google Scholar is the largest web search engine for academic literature that also provides access to rich metadata associated with the papers. The ACL Anthology (AA) is the largest repository of articles on Natural Language Processing (NLP). We extracted information from AA for about 44 thousand NLP papers and identified authors who published at least three papers there. We then extracted citation information from Google Scholar for all their papers (not just their AA papers). This resulted in a dataset of 1.1 million papers and associated Google Scholar information. We aligned the information in the AA and Google Scholar datasets to create the NLP Scholar Dataset – a single unified source of information (from both AA and Google Scholar) for tens of thousands of NLP papers. It can be used to identify broad trends in productivity, focus, and impact of NLP research. We present here initial work on analyzing the volume of research in NLP over the years and identifying the most cited papers in NLP. We also list a number of additional potential applications.

The state of being alone can have a substantial impact on our lives, though experiences with time alone diverge significantly among individuals. Psychologists distinguish between the concept of solitude, a positive state of voluntary aloneness, and the concept of loneliness, a negative state of dissatisfaction with the quality of one’s social interactions. Here, for the first time, we conduct a large-scale computational analysis to explore how the terms associated with the state of being alone are used in online language. We present SOLO (State of Being Alone), a corpus of over 4 million tweets collected with query terms solitude, lonely, and loneliness. We use SOLO to analyze the language and emotions associated with the state of being alone. We show that the term solitude tends to co-occur with more positive, high-dominance words (e.g., enjoy, bliss) while the terms lonely and loneliness frequently co-occur with negative, low-dominance words (e.g., scared, depressed), which confirms the conceptual distinctions made in psychology. We also show that women are more likely to report on negative feelings of being lonely as compared to men, and there are more teenagers among the tweeters that use the word lonely than among the tweeters that use the word solitude.

Child language studies are crucial in improving our understanding of child well-being; especially in determining the factors that impact happiness, the sources of anxiety, techniques of emotion regulation, and the mechanisms to cope with stress. However, much of this research is stymied by the lack of availability of large child-written texts. We present a new corpus of child-written text, PoKi, which includes about 62 thousand poems written by children from grades 1 to 12. PoKi is especially useful in studying child language because it comes with information about the age of the child authors (their grade). We analyze the words in PoKi along several emotion dimensions (valence, arousal, dominance) and discrete emotions (anger, fear, sadness, joy). We use non-parametric regressions to model developmental differences from early childhood to late-adolescence. Results show decreases in valence that are especially pronounced during mid-adolescence, while arousal and dominance peaked during adolescence. Gender differences in the developmental trajectory of emotions are also observed. Our results support and extend the current state of emotion development research.

There is a growing body of work on how word meaning changes over time: mutation. In contrast, there is very little work on how different words compete to represent the same meaning, and how the degree of success of words in that competition changes over time: natural selection. We present a new dataset, WordWars, with historical frequency data from the early 1800s to the early 2000s for monosemous English words in over 5000 synsets. We explore three broad questions with the dataset: (1) what is the degree to which predominant words in these synsets have changed, (2) how do prominent word features such as frequency, length, and concreteness impact natural selection, and (3) what are the differences between the predominant words of the 2000s and the predominant words of early 1800s. We show that close to one third of the synsets undergo a change in the predominant word in this time period. Manual annotation of these pairs shows that about 15% of these are orthographic variations, 25% involve affix changes, and 60% have completely different roots. We find that frequency, length, and concreteness all impact natural selection, albeit in different ways.

We extracted information from the ACL Anthology (AA) and Google Scholar (GS) to examine trends in citations of NLP papers. We explore questions such as: how well cited are papers of different types (journal articles, conference papers, demo papers, etc.)? how well cited are papers from different areas of within NLP? etc. Notably, we show that only about 56% of the papers in AA are cited ten or more times. CL Journal has the most cited papers, but its citation dominance has lessened in recent years. On average, long papers get almost three times as many citations as short papers; and papers on sentiment classification, anaphora resolution, and entity recognition have the highest median citations. The analyses presented here, and the associated dataset of NLP papers mapped to citations, have a number of uses including: understanding how the field is growing and quantifying the impact of different types of papers.

Disparities in authorship and citations across gender can have substantial adverse consequences not just on the disadvantaged genders, but also on the field of study as a whole. Measuring gender gaps is a crucial step towards addressing them. In this work, we examine female first author percentages and the citations to their papers in Natural Language Processing (1965 to 2019). We determine aggregate-level statistics using an existing manually curated author–gender list as well as first names strongly associated with a gender. We find that only about 29% of first authors are female and only about 25% of last authors are female. Notably, this percentage has not improved since the mid 2000s. We also show that, on average, female first authors are cited less than male first authors, even when controlling for experience and area of research. Finally, we discuss the ethical considerations involved in automatic demographic analysis.

As part of the NLP Scholar project, we created a single unified dataset of NLP papers and their meta-information (including citation numbers), by extracting and aligning information from the ACL Anthology and Google Scholar. In this paper, we describe several interconnected interactive visualizations (dashboards) that present various aspects of the data. Clicking on an item within a visualization or entering query terms in the search boxes filters the data in all visualizations in the dashboard. This allows users to search for papers in the area of their interest, published within specific time periods, published by specified authors, etc. The interactive visualizations presented here, and the associated dataset of papers mapped to citations, have additional uses as well including understanding how the field is growing (both overall and across sub-areas), as well as quantifying the impact of different types of papers on subsequent publications.

Bigrams (two-word sequences) hold a special place in semantic composition research since they are the smallest unit formed by composing words. A semantic relatedness dataset that includes bigrams will thus be useful in the development of automatic methods of semantic composition. However, existing relatedness datasets only include pairs of unigrams (single words). Further, existing datasets were created using rating scales and thus suffer from limitations such as in consistent annotations and scale region bias. In this paper, we describe how we created a large, fine-grained, bigram relatedness dataset (BiRD), using a comparative annotation technique called Best–Worst Scaling. Each of BiRD’s 3,345 English term pairs involves at least one bigram. We show that the relatedness scores obtained are highly reliable (split-half reliability r= 0.937). We analyze the data to obtain insights into bigram semantic relatedness. Finally, we present benchmark experiments on using the relatedness dataset as a testbed to evaluate simple unsupervised measures of semantic composition. BiRD is made freely available to foster further research on how meaning can be represented and how meaning can be composed.

In 2014, a chatty but immobile robot called hitchBOT set out to hitchhike across Canada. It similarly made its way across Germany and the Netherlands, and had begun a trip across the USA when it was destroyed by vandals. In this work, we analyze the emotions and sentiments associated with words in tweets posted before and after hitchBOT’s destruction to answer two questions: Were there any differences in the emotions expressed across the different countries visited by hitchBOT? And how did the public react to the demise of hitchBOT? Our analyses indicate that while there were few cross-cultural differences in sentiment towards hitchBOT, there was a significant negative emotional reaction to its destruction, suggesting that people had formed an emotional connection with hitchBOT and perceived its destruction as morally wrong. We discuss potential implications of anthropomorphism and emotional attachment to robots from the perspective of robot ethics.

Past shared tasks on emotions use data with both overt expressions of emotions (I am so happy to see you!) as well as subtle expressions where the emotions have to be inferred, for instance from event descriptions. Further, most datasets do not focus on the cause or the stimulus of the emotion. Here, for the first time, we propose a shared task where systems have to predict the emotions in a large automatically labeled dataset of tweets without access to words denoting emotions. Based on this intention, we call this the Implicit Emotion Shared Task (IEST) because the systems have to infer the emotion mostly from the context. Every tweet has an occurrence of an explicit emotion word that is masked. The tweets are collected in a manner such that they are likely to include a description of the cause of the emotion – the stimulus. Altogether, 30 teams submitted results which range from macro F1 scores of 21 % to 71 %. The baseline (Max-Ent bag of words and bigrams) obtains an F1 score of 60 % which was available to the participants during the development phase. A study with human annotators suggests that automatic methods outperform human predictions, possibly by honing into subtle textual clues not used by humans. Corpora, resources, and results are available at the shared task website at http://implicitemotions.wassa2018.com.

We present the SemEval-2018 Task 1: Affect in Tweets, which includes an array of subtasks on inferring the affectual state of a person from their tweet. For each task, we created labeled data from English, Arabic, and Spanish tweets. The individual tasks are: 1. emotion intensity regression, 2. emotion intensity ordinal classification, 3. valence (sentiment) regression, 4. valence ordinal classification, and 5. emotion classification. Seventy-five teams (about 200 team members) participated in the shared task. We summarize the methods, resources, and tools used by the participating teams, with a focus on the techniques and resources that are particularly useful. We also analyze systems for consistent bias towards a particular race or gender. The data is made freely available to further improve our understanding of how people convey emotions through language.

In this paper, we propose a regression system to infer the emotion intensity of a tweet. We develop a multi-aspect feature learning mechanism to capture the most discriminative semantic features of a tweet as well as the emotion information conveyed by each word in it. We combine six types of feature groups: (1) a tweet representation learned by an LSTM deep neural network on the training data, (2) a tweet representation learned by an LSTM network on a large corpus of tweets that contain emotion words (a distant supervision corpus), (3) word embeddings trained on the distant supervision corpus and averaged over all words in a tweet, (4) word and character n-grams, (5) features derived from various sentiment and emotion lexicons, and (6) other hand-crafted features. As part of the word embedding training, we also learn the distributed representations of multi-word expressions (MWEs) and negated forms of words. An SVR regressor is then trained over the full set of features. We evaluate the effectiveness of our ensemble feature sets on the SemEval-2018 Task 1 datasets and achieve a Pearson correlation of 72% on the task of tweet emotion intensity prediction.

Automatic machine learning systems can inadvertently accentuate and perpetuate inappropriate human biases. Past work on examining inappropriate biases has largely focused on just individual systems. Further, there is no benchmark dataset for examining inappropriate biases in systems. Here for the first time, we present the Equity Evaluation Corpus (EEC), which consists of 8,640 English sentences carefully chosen to tease out biases towards certain races and genders. We use the dataset to examine 219 automatic sentiment analysis systems that took part in a recent shared task, SemEval-2018 Task 1 ‘Affect in Tweets’. We find that several of the systems show statistically significant bias; that is, they consistently provide slightly higher sentiment intensity predictions for one race or one gender. We make the EEC freely available.

Being able to predict whether people agree or disagree with an assertion (i.e. an explicit, self-contained statement) has several applications ranging from predicting how many people will like or dislike a social media post to classifying posts based on whether they are in accordance with a particular point of view. We formalize this as two NLP tasks: predicting judgments of (i) individuals and (ii) groups based on the text of the assertion and previous judgments. We evaluate a wide range of approaches on a crowdsourced data set containing over 100,000 judgments on over 2,000 assertions. We find that predicting individual judgments is a hard task with our best results only slightly exceeding a majority baseline, but that judgments of groups can be more reliably predicted using a Siamese neural network, which outperforms all other approaches by a wide margin.

Words play a central role in language and thought. Factor analysis studies have shown that the primary dimensions of meaning are valence, arousal, and dominance (VAD). We present the NRC VAD Lexicon, which has human ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance for more than 20,000 English words. We use Best–Worst Scaling to obtain fine-grained scores and address issues of annotation consistency that plague traditional rating scale methods of annotation. We show that the ratings obtained are vastly more reliable than those in existing lexicons. We also show that there exist statistically significant differences in the shared understanding of valence, arousal, and dominance across demographic variables such as age, gender, and personality.

We present the first shared task on detecting the intensity of emotion felt by the speaker of a tweet. We create the first datasets of tweets annotated for anger, fear, joy, and sadness intensities using a technique called best–worst scaling (BWS). We show that the annotations lead to reliable fine-grained intensity scores (rankings of tweets by intensity). The data was partitioned into training, development, and test sets for the competition. Twenty-two teams participated in the shared task, with the best system obtaining a Pearson correlation of 0.747 with the gold intensity scores. We summarize the machine learning setups, resources, and tools used by the participating teams, with a focus on the techniques and resources that are particularly useful for the task. The emotion intensity dataset and the shared task are helping improve our understanding of how we convey more or less intense emotions through language.

Rating scales are a widely used method for data annotation; however, they present several challenges, such as difficulty in maintaining inter- and intra-annotator consistency. Best–worst scaling (BWS) is an alternative method of annotation that is claimed to produce high-quality annotations while keeping the required number of annotations similar to that of rating scales. However, the veracity of this claim has never been systematically established. Here for the first time, we set up an experiment that directly compares the rating scale method with BWS. We show that with the same total number of annotations, BWS produces significantly more reliable results than the rating scale.

This paper examines the task of detecting intensity of emotion from text. We create the first datasets of tweets annotated for anger, fear, joy, and sadness intensities. We use a technique called best–worst scaling (BWS) that improves annotation consistency and obtains reliable fine-grained scores. We show that emotion-word hashtags often impact emotion intensity, usually conveying a more intense emotion. Finally, we create a benchmark regression system and conduct experiments to determine: which features are useful for detecting emotion intensity; and, the extent to which two emotions are similar in terms of how they manifest in language.

Existing Arabic sentiment lexicons have low coverage―with only a few thousand entries. In this paper, we present several large sentiment lexicons that were automatically generated using two different methods: (1) by using distant supervision techniques on Arabic tweets, and (2) by translating English sentiment lexicons into Arabic using a freely available statistical machine translation system. We compare the usefulness of new and old sentiment lexicons in the downstream application of sentence-level sentiment analysis. Our baseline sentiment analysis system uses numerous surface form features. Nonetheless, the system benefits from using additional features drawn from sentiment lexicons. The best result is obtained using the automatically generated Dialectal Hashtag Lexicon and the Arabic translations of the NRC Emotion Lexicon (accuracy of 66.6%). Finally, we describe a qualitative study of the automatic translations of English sentiment lexicons into Arabic, which shows that about 88% of the automatically translated entries are valid for English as well. Close to 10% of the invalid entries are caused by gross mistranslations, close to 40% by translations into a related word, and about 50% by differences in how the word is used in Arabic.

Sentiment composition is the determining of sentiment of a multi-word linguistic unit, such as a phrase or a sentence, based on its constituents. We focus on sentiment composition in phrases formed by at least one positive and at least one negative word ― phrases like ‘happy accident’ and ‘best winter break’. We refer to such phrases as opposing polarity phrases. We manually annotate a collection of opposing polarity phrases and their constituent single words with real-valued sentiment intensity scores using a method known as Best―Worst Scaling. We show that the obtained annotations are consistent. We explore the entries in the lexicon for linguistic regularities that govern sentiment composition in opposing polarity phrases. Finally, we list the current and possible future applications of the lexicon.

We can often detect from a person’s utterances whether he/she is in favor of or against a given target entity (a product, topic, another person, etc.). Here for the first time we present a dataset of tweets annotated for whether the tweeter is in favor of or against pre-chosen targets of interest―their stance. The targets of interest may or may not be referred to in the tweets, and they may or may not be the target of opinion in the tweets. The data pertains to six targets of interest commonly known and debated in the United States. Apart from stance, the tweets are also annotated for whether the target of interest is the target of opinion in the tweet. The annotations were performed by crowdsourcing. Several techniques were employed to encourage high-quality annotations (for example, providing clear and simple instructions) and to identify and discard poor annotations (for example, using a small set of check questions annotated by the authors). This Stance Dataset, which was subsequently also annotated for sentiment, can be used to better understand the relationship between stance, sentiment, entity relationships, and textual inference.

Computational linguistics has witnessed a surge of interest in approaches to emotion and affect analysis, tackling problems that extend beyond sentiment analysis in depth and complexity. This area involves basic emotions (such as joy, sadness, and fear) as well as any of the hundreds of other emotions humans are capable of (such as optimism, frustration, and guilt), expanding into affective conditions, experiences, and activities. Leveraging linguistic data for computational affect and emotion inference enables opportunities to address a range of affect-related tasks, problems, and non-invasive applications that capture aspects essential to the human condition and individuals’ cognitive processes. These efforts enable and facilitate human-centered computing experiences, as demonstrated by applications across clinical, socio-political, artistic, educational, and commercial domains. Efforts to computationally detect, characterize, and generate emotions or affect-related phenomena respond equally to technological needs for personalized, micro-level analytics and broad-coverage, macro-level inference, and they have involved both small and massive amounts of data.While this is an exciting area with numerous opportunities for members of the ACL community, a major obstacle is its intersection with other investigatory traditions, necessitating knowledge transfer. This tutorial comprehensively integrates relevant concepts and frameworks from linguistics, cognitive science, affective computing, and computational linguistics in order to equip researchers and practitioners with the adequate background and knowledge to work effectively on problems and tasks either directly involving, or benefiting from having an understanding of, affect and emotion analysis.There is a substantial body of work in traditional sentiment analysis focusing on positive and negative sentiment. This tutorial covers approaches and features that migrate well to affect analysis. We also discuss key differences from sentiment analysis, and their implications for analyzing affect and emotion.The tutorial begins with an introduction that highlights opportunities, key terminology, and interesting tasks and challenges (1). The body of the tutorial covers characteristics of emotive language use with emphasis on relevance for computational analysis (2); linguistic data—from conceptual analysis frameworks via useful existing resources to important annotation topics (3); computational approaches for lexical semantic emotion analysis (4); computational approaches for emotion and affect analysis in text (5); visualization methods (6); and a survey of application areas with affect-related problems (7). The tutorial concludes with an outline of future directions and a discussion with participants about the areas relevant to their respective tasks of interest (8).Besides attending the tutorial, tutorial participants receive electronic copies of tutorial slides, a complete reference list, as well as a categorized annotated bibliography that concentrates on seminal works, recent important publications, and other products and resources for researchers and developers.

Automatically detecting sentiment of product reviews, blogs, tweets, and SMS messages has attracted extensive interest from both the academia and industry. It has a number of applications, including: tracking sentiment towards products, movies, politicians, etc.; improving customer relation models; detecting happiness and well-being; and improving automatic dialogue systems. In this tutorial, we will describe how you can create a state-of-the-art sentiment analysis system, with a focus on social media posts.We begin with an introduction to sentiment analysis and its various forms: term level, message level, document level, and aspect level. We will describe how sentiment analysis systems are evaluated, especially through recent SemEval shared tasks: Sentiment Analysis of Twitter (SemEval-2013 Task 2, SemEval 2014-Task 9) and Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (SemEval-2014 Task 4).We will give an overview of the best sentiment analysis systems at this point of time, including those that are conventional statistical systems as well as those using deep learning approaches. We will describe in detail the NRC-Canada systems, which were the overall best performing systems in all three SemEval competitions listed above. These are simple lexical- and sentiment-lexicon features based systems, which are relatively easy to re-implement.We will discuss features that had the most impact (those derived from sentiment lexicons and negation handling). We will present how large tweet-specific sentiment lexicons can be automatically generated and evaluated. We will also show how negation impacts sentiment differently depending on whether the scope of the negation is positive or negative. Finally, we will flesh out limitations of current approaches and promising future directions.