English Prompts are Better for NLI-based Zero-Shot Emotion Classification than Target-Language Prompts

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Hauptverfasser: Bareiß, Patrick, Klinger, Roman, Barnes, Jeremy
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Bareiß, Patrick
Klinger, Roman
Barnes, Jeremy
author_facet Bareiß, Patrick
Klinger, Roman
Barnes, Jeremy
contents Emotion classification in text is a challenging task due to the processes involved when interpreting a textual description of a potential emotion stimulus. In addition, the set of emotion categories is highly domain-specific. For instance, literature analysis might require the use of aesthetic emotions (e.g., finding something beautiful), and social media analysis could benefit from fine-grained sets (e.g., separating anger from annoyance) than only those that represent basic categories as they have been proposed by Paul Ekman (anger, disgust, fear, joy, surprise, sadness). This renders the task an interesting field for zero-shot classifications, in which the label set is not known at model development time. Unfortunately, most resources for emotion analysis are English, and therefore, most studies on emotion analysis have been performed in English, including those that involve prompting language models for text labels. This leaves us with a research gap that we address in this paper: In which language should we prompt for emotion labels on non-English texts? This is particularly of interest when we have access to a multilingual large language model, because we could request labels with English prompts even for non-English data. Our experiments with natural language inference-based language models show that it is consistently better to use English prompts even if the data is in a different language.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_03223
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle English Prompts are Better for NLI-based Zero-Shot Emotion Classification than Target-Language Prompts
Bareiß, Patrick
Klinger, Roman
Barnes, Jeremy
Computation and Language
Emotion classification in text is a challenging task due to the processes involved when interpreting a textual description of a potential emotion stimulus. In addition, the set of emotion categories is highly domain-specific. For instance, literature analysis might require the use of aesthetic emotions (e.g., finding something beautiful), and social media analysis could benefit from fine-grained sets (e.g., separating anger from annoyance) than only those that represent basic categories as they have been proposed by Paul Ekman (anger, disgust, fear, joy, surprise, sadness). This renders the task an interesting field for zero-shot classifications, in which the label set is not known at model development time. Unfortunately, most resources for emotion analysis are English, and therefore, most studies on emotion analysis have been performed in English, including those that involve prompting language models for text labels. This leaves us with a research gap that we address in this paper: In which language should we prompt for emotion labels on non-English texts? This is particularly of interest when we have access to a multilingual large language model, because we could request labels with English prompts even for non-English data. Our experiments with natural language inference-based language models show that it is consistently better to use English prompts even if the data is in a different language.
title English Prompts are Better for NLI-based Zero-Shot Emotion Classification than Target-Language Prompts
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03223