Modeling Emotional Trajectories in Written Stories Utilizing Transformers and Weakly-Supervised Learning

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Main Authors: Christ, Lukas, Amiriparian, Shahin, Milling, Manuel, Aslan, Ilhan, Schuller, Björn W.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Christ, Lukas
Amiriparian, Shahin
Milling, Manuel
Aslan, Ilhan
Schuller, Björn W.
author_facet Christ, Lukas
Amiriparian, Shahin
Milling, Manuel
Aslan, Ilhan
Schuller, Björn W.
contents Telling stories is an integral part of human communication which can evoke emotions and influence the affective states of the audience. Automatically modeling emotional trajectories in stories has thus attracted considerable scholarly interest. However, as most existing works have been limited to unsupervised dictionary-based approaches, there is no benchmark for this task. We address this gap by introducing continuous valence and arousal labels for an existing dataset of children's stories originally annotated with discrete emotion categories. We collect additional annotations for this data and map the categorical labels to the continuous valence and arousal space. For predicting the thus obtained emotionality signals, we fine-tune a DeBERTa model and improve upon this baseline via a weakly supervised learning approach. The best configuration achieves a Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) of $.8221$ for valence and $.7125$ for arousal on the test set, demonstrating the efficacy of our proposed approach. A detailed analysis shows the extent to which the results vary depending on factors such as the author, the individual story, or the section within the story. In addition, we uncover the weaknesses of our approach by investigating examples that prove to be difficult to predict.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_02251
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Modeling Emotional Trajectories in Written Stories Utilizing Transformers and Weakly-Supervised Learning
Christ, Lukas
Amiriparian, Shahin
Milling, Manuel
Aslan, Ilhan
Schuller, Björn W.
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Telling stories is an integral part of human communication which can evoke emotions and influence the affective states of the audience. Automatically modeling emotional trajectories in stories has thus attracted considerable scholarly interest. However, as most existing works have been limited to unsupervised dictionary-based approaches, there is no benchmark for this task. We address this gap by introducing continuous valence and arousal labels for an existing dataset of children's stories originally annotated with discrete emotion categories. We collect additional annotations for this data and map the categorical labels to the continuous valence and arousal space. For predicting the thus obtained emotionality signals, we fine-tune a DeBERTa model and improve upon this baseline via a weakly supervised learning approach. The best configuration achieves a Concordance Correlation Coefficient (CCC) of $.8221$ for valence and $.7125$ for arousal on the test set, demonstrating the efficacy of our proposed approach. A detailed analysis shows the extent to which the results vary depending on factors such as the author, the individual story, or the section within the story. In addition, we uncover the weaknesses of our approach by investigating examples that prove to be difficult to predict.
title Modeling Emotional Trajectories in Written Stories Utilizing Transformers and Weakly-Supervised Learning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02251