We are interested in the problem of understanding personal narratives (PN) - spoken or written - recollections of facts, events, and thoughts. In PN, emotion carriers are the speech or text segments that best explain the emotional state of the user. Such segments may include entities, verb or noun phrases. Advanced automatic understanding of PNs requires not only the prediction of the user emotional state but also to identify which events (e.g. "the loss of 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 from speech transcriptions in the Ulm State-of-Mind in Speech (USoMS) corpus, a dataset of German PNs. 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.
University of Derby（德比大学）；Goldsmiths University of London（伦敦大学金史密斯学院）；Royal Holloway, University of London（伦敦大学皇家霍洛威学院）
Using geometric data analysis, our objective is the analysis of narrative, with narrative of emotion being the focus in this work. The following two principles for analysis of emotion inform our work. Firstly, emotion is revealed not as a quality in its own right but rather through interaction. We study the 2-way relationship of Ilsa and Rick in the movie Casablanca, and the 3-way relationship of Emma, Charles and Rodolphe in the novel {\em Madame Bovary}. Secondly, emotion, that is expression of states of mind of subjects, is formed and evolves within the narrative that expresses external eve…
Image narrative generation is a task to create a story from an image with a subjective viewpoint. Given the importance of the subjective feelings of writers, readers, and characters in storytelling, an image narrative generation method should consider human emotion. In this study, we propose a novel method of image narrative generation called ViNTER (Visual Narrative Transformer with Emotion arc Representation), which takes "emotion arc" as input to capture a sequence of emotional changes. Since emotion arcs represent the trajectory of emotional change, it is expected that we can include detai…
Personal Narratives (PN) - recollections of facts, events, and thoughts from one's own experience - are often used in everyday conversations. So far, PNs have mainly been explored for tasks such as valence prediction or emotion classification (e.g. happy, sad). However, these tasks might overlook more fine-grained information that could prove to be relevant for understanding PNs. In this work, we propose a novel task for Narrative Understanding: Emotion Carrier Recognition (ECR). Emotion carriers, the text fragments that carry the emotions of the narrator (e.g. loss of a grandpa, high school r…
Narrative is a ubiquitous component of human communication. Understanding its structure plays a critical role in a wide variety of applications, ranging from simple comparative analyses to enhanced narrative retrieval, comprehension, or reasoning capabilities. Prior research in narratology has highlighted the importance of studying the links between cognitive and linguistic aspects of narratives for effective comprehension. This interdependence is related to the textual semantics and mental language in narratives, referring to characters' motivations, feelings or emotions, and beliefs. However…
We introduce a new dataset for multi-class emotion analysis from long-form narratives in English. The Dataset for Emotions of Narrative Sequences (DENS) was collected from both classic literature available on Project Gutenberg and modern online narratives available on Wattpad, annotated using Amazon Mechanical Turk. A number of statistics and baseline benchmarks are provided for the dataset. Of the tested techniques, we find that the fine-tuning of a pre-trained BERT model achieves the best results, with an average micro-F1 score of 60.4%. Our results show that the dataset provides a novel opp…
Sharing personal narratives is a fundamental aspect of human social behavior as it helps share our life experiences. We can tell stories and rely on our background to understand their context, similarities, and differences. A substantial effort has been made towards developing storytelling machines or inferring characters' features. However, we don't usually find models that compare narratives. This task is remarkably challenging for machines since they, as sometimes we do, lack an understanding of what similarity means. To address this challenge, we first introduce a corpus of real-world spok…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）
Word embedding models such as GloVe are widely used in natural language processing (NLP) research to convert words into vectors. Here, we provide a preliminary guide to probe latent emotions in text through GloVe word vectors. First, we trained a neural network model to predict continuous emotion valence ratings by taking linguistic inputs from Stanford Emotional Narratives Dataset (SEND). After interpreting the weights in the model, we found that only a few dimensions of the word vectors contributed to expressing emotions in text, and words were clustered on the basis of their emotional polar…
We present a new corpus, PersonaBank, consisting of 108 personal stories from weblogs that have been annotated with their Story Intention Graphs, a deep representation of the fabula of a story. We describe the topics of the stories and the basis of the Story Intention Graph representation, as well as the process of annotating the stories to produce the Story Intention Graphs and the challenges of adapting the tool to this new personal narrative domain We also discuss how the corpus can be used in applications that retell the story using different styles of tellings, co-tellings, or as a conten…
ExTax: Explainable Disinformation Detection via Persuasion, Emotion, and Narrative Role Taxonomies
Peking University（北京大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；North China University of Science and Technology（华北理工大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Soochow University（苏州大学）；Beihang University（北航）；University of Illinois Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）
People often share personal narratives in order to seek advice from others. To properly infer the narrator's intention, one needs to apply a certain degree of common sense and social intuition. To test the capabilities of NLP systems to recover such intuition, we introduce the new task of inferring what is the advice-seeking goal behind a personal narrative. We formulate this as a cloze test, where the goal is to identify which of two advice-seeking questions was removed from a given narrative. The main challenge in constructing this task is finding pairs of semantically plausible advice-seeki…
Technische Hochschule Nürnberg Georg Simon Ohm（纽伦堡乔治·西蒙·欧姆应用科学大学）；University of Trento（特伦托大学）
Personal narratives (PN) - spoken or written - are recollections of facts, people, events, and thoughts from one's own experience. Emotion recognition and sentiment analysis tasks are usually defined at the utterance or document level. However, in this work, we focus on Emotion Carriers (EC) defined as the segments (speech or text) that best explain the emotional state of the narrator ("loss of father", "made me choose"). Once extracted, such EC can provide a richer representation of the user state to improve natural language understanding and dialogue modeling. In previous work, it has been s…
We investigate what distinguishes reported dreams from other personal narratives. The continuity hypothesis, stemming from psychological dream analysis work, states that most dreams refer to a person's daily life and personal concerns, similar to other personal narratives such as diary entries. Differences between the two texts may reveal the linguistic markers of dream text, which could be the basis for new dream analysis work and for the automatic detection of dream descriptions. We used three text analytics methods: text classification, topic modeling, and text coherence analysis, and appli…
There have been a recent line of works to automatically predict the emotions of posts in social media. Existing approaches consider the posts individually and predict their emotions independently. Different from previous researches, we explore the dependence among relevant posts via the authors' backgrounds, since the authors with similar backgrounds, e.g., gender, location, tend to express similar emotions. However, such personal attributes are not easy to obtain in most social media websites, and it is hard to capture attributes-aware words to connect similar people. Accordingly, we propose …
Artificial Intelligence Application Research Center, Huawei Technologies（华为技术有限公司人工智能应用研究中心）
In this paper, we describe approaches for developing Emily, an emotion-affective open-domain chatbot. Emily can perceive a user's negative emotion state and offer supports by positively converting the user's emotion states. This is done by finetuning a pretrained dialogue model upon data capturing dialogue contexts and desirable emotion states transition across turns. Emily can differentiate a general open-domain dialogue utterance with questions relating to personal information. By leveraging a question-answering approach based on knowledge graphs to handle personal information, Emily maintai…
PERCEIVE: A Benchmark for Personalized Emotion and Communication Behavior Understanding on Social Media
School of Computer and Information Technology, Shanxi University, China（山西大学计算机与信息学院）；Key Laboratory of Computational Intelligence and Chinese Information Processing of Ministry of Education, Shanxi University, China（教育部计算智能与中文信息处理重点实验室，山西大学，中国）；Joint Laboratory of Tourism Big Data in Shanxi Province, China（山西省旅游大数据联合实验室）
Sirius-Beta；University of Massachusetts Boston（马萨诸塞大学波士顿分校）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Stories are a vital form of communication in human culture; they are employed daily to persuade, to elicit sympathy, or to convey a message. Computational understanding of human narratives, especially high-level narrative structures, remain limited to date. Multiple literary theories for narrative structures exist, but operationalization of the theories has remained a challenge. We developed an annotation scheme by consolidating and extending existing narratological theories, including Labov and Waletsky's (1967) functional categorization scheme and Freytag's (1863) pyramid of dramatic tension…
Enrolment-based personalisation for improving individual-level fairness in speech emotion recognition
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Munich Center for Machine Learning（慕尼黑机器学习中心）；Munich Data Science Institute（慕尼黑数据科学研究所）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国学院）
To understand narrative, humans draw inferences about the underlying relations between narrative events. Cognitive theories of narrative understanding define these inferences as four different types of causality, that include pairs of events A, B where A physically causes B (X drop, X break), to pairs of events where A causes emotional state B (Y saw X, Y felt fear). Previous work on learning narrative relations from text has either focused on "strict" physical causality, or has been vague about what relation is being learned. This paper learns pairs of causal events from a corpus of film scen…
Carleton University（卡尔顿大学）；National Research Council Canada（加拿大国家研究委员会）
Emotion dynamics is a framework for measuring how an individual's emotions change over time. It is a powerful tool for understanding how we behave and interact with the world. In this paper, we introduce a framework to track emotion dynamics through one's utterances. Specifically we introduce a number of utterance emotion dynamics (UED) metrics inspired by work in Psychology. We use this approach to trace emotional arcs of movie characters. We analyze thousands of such character arcs to test hypotheses that inform our broader understanding of stories. Notably, we show that there is a tendency …
The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；The University of South Australia（南澳大学）
Social media discussion of COVID-19 provides a rich source of information into how the virus affects people's lives that is qualitatively different from traditional public health datasets. In particular, when individuals self-report their experiences over the course of the virus on social media, it can allow for identification of the emotions each stage of symptoms engenders in the patient. Posts to the Reddit forum r/COVID19Positive contain first-hand accounts from COVID-19 positive patients, giving insight into personal struggles with the virus. These posts often feature a temporal structure…
