Assessing the Reliability and Validity of GPT-4 in Annotating Emotion Appraisal Ratings

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ruder, Deniss, Uusberg, Andero, Sirts, Kairit
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Ruder, Deniss
Uusberg, Andero
Sirts, Kairit
author_facet Ruder, Deniss
Uusberg, Andero
Sirts, Kairit
contents Appraisal theories suggest that emotions arise from subjective evaluations of events, referred to as appraisals. The taxonomy of appraisals is quite diverse, and they are usually given ratings on a Likert scale to be annotated in an experiencer-annotator or reader-annotator paradigm. This paper studies GPT-4 as a reader-annotator of 21 specific appraisal ratings in different prompt settings, aiming to evaluate and improve its performance compared to human annotators. We found that GPT-4 is an effective reader-annotator that performs close to or even slightly better than human annotators, and its results can be significantly improved by using a majority voting of five completions. GPT-4 also effectively predicts appraisal ratings and emotion labels using a single prompt, but adding instruction complexity results in poorer performance. We also found that longer event descriptions lead to more accurate annotations for both model and human annotator ratings. This work contributes to the growing usage of LLMs in psychology and the strategies for improving GPT-4 performance in annotating appraisals.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_16883
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Assessing the Reliability and Validity of GPT-4 in Annotating Emotion Appraisal Ratings
Ruder, Deniss
Uusberg, Andero
Sirts, Kairit
Computation and Language
Appraisal theories suggest that emotions arise from subjective evaluations of events, referred to as appraisals. The taxonomy of appraisals is quite diverse, and they are usually given ratings on a Likert scale to be annotated in an experiencer-annotator or reader-annotator paradigm. This paper studies GPT-4 as a reader-annotator of 21 specific appraisal ratings in different prompt settings, aiming to evaluate and improve its performance compared to human annotators. We found that GPT-4 is an effective reader-annotator that performs close to or even slightly better than human annotators, and its results can be significantly improved by using a majority voting of five completions. GPT-4 also effectively predicts appraisal ratings and emotion labels using a single prompt, but adding instruction complexity results in poorer performance. We also found that longer event descriptions lead to more accurate annotations for both model and human annotator ratings. This work contributes to the growing usage of LLMs in psychology and the strategies for improving GPT-4 performance in annotating appraisals.
title Assessing the Reliability and Validity of GPT-4 in Annotating Emotion Appraisal Ratings
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16883