We propose the task of emotion style transfer, which is particularly challenging, as emotions (here: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise) are on the fence between content and style. To understand the particular difficulties of this task, we design a transparent emotion style transfer pipeline based on three steps: (1) select the words that are promising to be substituted to change the emotion (with a brute-force approach and selection based on the attention mechanism of an emotion classifier), (2) find sets of words as candidates for substituting the words (based on lexical and distributional semantics), and (3) select the most promising combination of substitutions with an objective function which consists of components for content (based on BERT sentence embeddings), emotion (based on an emotion classifier), and fluency (based on a neural language model). This comparably straight-forward setup enables us to explore the task and understand in what cases lexical substitution can vary the emotional load of texts, how changes in content and style interact and if they are at odds. We further evaluate our pipeline quantitatively in an automated and an annotation study based on Tweets and find, indeed, that simultaneous adjustments of content and emotion are conflicting objectives: as we show in a qualitative analysis motivated by Scherer's emotion component model, this is particularly the case for implicit emotion expressions based on cognitive appraisal or descriptions of bodily reactions.
Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；Hasso Plattner Institute/University of Potsdam（哈索·普拉特纳研究所/波茨坦大学）
What do word vector representations reveal about the emotions associated with words? In this study, we consider the task of estimating word-level emotion intensity scores for specific emotions, exploring unsupervised, supervised, and finally a self-supervised method of extracting emotional associations from word vector representations. Overall, we find that word vectors carry substantial potential for inducing fine-grained emotion intensity scores, showing a far higher correlation with human ground truth ratings than achieved by state-of-the-art emotion lexicons.
Lomonosov Moscow State University（罗蒙诺索夫莫斯科国立大学）；National Research University Higher School of Economics（国立研究型大学高等经济学院）；Samsung Research Center Russia（三星俄罗斯研究中心）
We propose a solution for the LSCDiscovery shared task on Lexical Semantic Change Detection in Spanish. Our approach is based on generating lexical substitutes that describe old and new senses of a given word. This approach achieves the second best result in sense loss and sense gain detection subtasks. By observing those substitutes that are specific for only one time period, one can understand which senses were obtained or lost. This allows providing more detailed information about semantic change to the user and makes our method interpretable.
Samsung R&D Institute Russia（三星俄罗斯研发研究院）；National Research University Higher School of Economics（国立研究型大学高等经济学院）；Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究院）
Lexical substitution in context is an extremely powerful technology that can be used as a backbone of various NLP applications, such as word sense induction, lexical relation extraction, data augmentation, etc. In this paper, we present a large-scale comparative study of popular neural language and masked language models (LMs and MLMs), such as context2vec, ELMo, BERT, XLNet, applied to the task of lexical substitution. We show that already competitive results achieved by SOTA LMs/MLMs can be further improved if information about the target word is injected properly, and compare several target…
We release a new benchmark for lexical substitution, the task of finding appropriate substitutes for a target word in a context. To assist humans with writing, lexical substitution systems can suggest words that humans cannot easily think of. However, existing benchmarks depend on human recall as the only source of data, and therefore lack coverage of the substitutes that would be most helpful to humans. Furthermore, annotators often provide substitutes of low quality, which are not actually appropriate in the given context. We collect higher-coverage and higher-quality data by framing lexical…
Always Keep your Target in Mind: Studying Semantics and Improving Performance of Neural Lexical Substitution
Samsung Research Center Russia（三星俄罗斯研究中心）；Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究院）；Lomonosov Moscow State University（罗蒙诺索夫莫斯科国立大学）；HSE University（俄罗斯国立高等经济大学）
Do Audio LLMs Really LISTEN, or Just Transcribe? Measuring Lexical vs. Acoustic Emotion Cues Reliance
Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State University, USA（语言学系，俄亥俄州立大学）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University, USA（计算机科学与工程系，俄亥俄州立大学）；Department of Information Sciences and Technology, Penn State University, USA（信息科学与技术系，宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；Amazon, USA（亚马逊公司）
The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；RIKEN Center for Advanced Intelligence Project (AIP)（理化学研究所高级智能项目中心）；MBZUAI（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）
We propose a new unsupervised method for lexical substitution using pre-trained language models. Compared to previous approaches that use the generative capability of language models to predict substitutes, our method retrieves substitutes based on the similarity of contextualised and decontextualised word embeddings, i.e. the average contextual representation of a word in multiple contexts. We conduct experiments in English and Italian, and show that our method substantially outperforms strong baselines and establishes a new state-of-the-art without any explicit supervision or fine-tuning. We…
Tilburg University（蒂尔堡大学）；University of Antwerp（安特卫普大学）；Borealis AI（Borealis人工智能研究院）
Written language contains stylistic cues that can be exploited to automatically infer a variety of potentially sensitive author information. Adversarial stylometry intends to attack such models by rewriting an author's text. Our research proposes several components to facilitate deployment of these adversarial attacks in the wild, where neither data nor target models are accessible. We introduce a transformer-based extension of a lexical replacement attack, and show it achieves high transferability when trained on a weakly labeled corpus -- decreasing target model performance below chance. Whi…
This paper presents a web-based demonstration of Emotion Twenty Questions (EMO20Q), a dialog game whose purpose is to study how people describe emotions. EMO20Q can also be used to develop artificially intelligent dialog agents that can play the game. In previous work, an EMO20Q agent used a sequential Bayesian machine learning model and could play the question-asking role. Newer transformer-based neural machine learning models have made it possible to develop an agent for the question-answering role. This demo paper describes the recent developments in the question-answering role of the EMO20…
Lexicons of word-emotion associations are widely used in research and real-world applications. As part of my research, I have created several such lexicons (e.g., the NRC Emotion Lexicon). This paper outlines some practical and ethical considerations involved in the effective use of these lexical resources.
Brazilian Network Information Center (NIC.br)（巴西网络信息中心）；Mackenzie Presbyterian University（麦肯齐长老会大学）；Jusbrasil
Affective Computing is the study of how computers can recognize, interpret and simulate human affects. Sentiment Analysis is a common task inNLP related to this topic, but it focuses only on emotion valence (positive, negative, neutral). An emerging approach in NLP is Emotion Recognition, which relies on fined-grained classification. This research describes an approach to create a lexical-based weakly supervised corpus for fine-grained emotion in Portuguese. We evaluated our dataset by fine-tuning a transformer-based language model (BERT) and validating it on a Gold Standard annotated validati…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Text content created by humans or language models is often stolen or misused by adversaries. Tracing text provenance can help claim the ownership of text content or identify the malicious users who distribute misleading content like machine-generated fake news. There have been some attempts to achieve this, mainly based on watermarking techniques. Specifically, traditional text watermarking methods embed watermarks by slightly altering text format like line spacing and font, which, however, are fragile to cross-media transmissions like OCR. Considering this, natural language watermarking metho…
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…
Studies on emotion recognition (ER) show that combining lexical and acoustic information results in more robust and accurate models. The majority of the studies focus on settings where both modalities are available in training and evaluation. However, in practice, this is not always the case; getting ASR output may represent a bottleneck in a deployment pipeline due to computational complexity or privacy-related constraints. To address this challenge, we study the problem of efficiently combining acoustic and lexical modalities during training while still providing a deployable acoustic model …
Pre-trained model representations have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance in speech recognition, natural language processing, and other applications. Speech models, such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and Hidden units BERT (HuBERT), have enabled generating lexical and acoustic representations to benefit speech recognition applications. We investigated the use of pre-trained model representations for estimating dimensional emotions, such as activation, valence, and dominance, from speech. We observed that while valence may rely heavily on lexical repres…
Multi-word expressions, verb-particle constructions, idiomatically combining phrases, and phrasal idioms have something in common: not all of their elements contribute to the argument structure of the predicate implicated by the expression. Radically lexicalized theories of grammar that avoid string-, term-, logical form-, and tree-writing, and categorial grammars that avoid wrap operation, make predictions about the categories involved in verb-particles and phrasal idioms. They may require singleton types, which can only substitute for one value, not just for one kind of value. These types ar…
Yangzhou University（扬州大学）；Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；Mininglamp Academy of Sciences（明略科学院）；Minininglamp Technology（明略科技）
Lexical simplification (LS) aims to replace complex words in a given sentence with their simpler alternatives of equivalent meaning. Recently unsupervised lexical simplification approaches only rely on the complex word itself regardless of the given sentence to generate candidate substitutions, which will inevitably produce a large number of spurious candidates. We present a simple LS approach that makes use of the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) which can consider both the given sentence and the complex word during generating candidate substitutions for the comp…
Amazon Research Germany（亚马逊德国研究院）；Umeå University（于默奥大学）
In this paper, we aim to reveal the impact of lexical-semantic resources, used in particular for word sense disambiguation and sense-level semantic categorization, on automatic personality classification task. While stylistic features (e.g., part-of-speech counts) have been shown their power in this task, the impact of semantics beyond targeted word lists is relatively unexplored. We propose and extract three types of lexical-semantic features, which capture high-level concepts and emotions, overcoming the lexical gap of word n-grams. Our experimental results are comparable to state-of-the-art…
Graduate School ‘The Romantic Model’（“浪漫主义模式”研究生院）；Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena（耶拿弗里德里希·席勒大学）
We here introduce a substantially extended version of JeSemE, an interactive website for visually exploring computationally derived time-variant information on word meanings and lexical emotions assembled from five large diachronic text corpora. JeSemE is designed for scholars in the (digital) humanities as an alternative to consulting manually compiled, printed dictionaries for such information (if available at all). This tool uniquely combines state-of-the-art distributional semantics with a nuanced model of human emotions, two information streams we deem beneficial for a data-driven interpr…
Manchester Metropolitan University（曼彻斯特城市大学）；University of Wolverhampton（伍尔弗汉普顿大学）；Rochester Institute of Technology（罗切斯特理工学院）
Identifying words which may cause difficulty for a reader is an essential step in most lexical text simplification systems prior to lexical substitution and can also be used for assessing the readability of a text. This task is commonly referred to as Complex Word Identification (CWI) and is often modelled as a supervised classification problem. For training such systems, annotated datasets in which words and sometimes multi-word expressions are labelled regarding complexity are required. In this paper we analyze previous work carried out in this task and investigate the properties of CWI data…
Emotion lexicons describe the affective meaning of words and thus constitute a centerpiece for advanced sentiment and emotion analysis. Yet, manually curated lexicons are only available for a handful of languages, leaving most languages of the world without such a precious resource for downstream applications. Even worse, their coverage is often limited both in terms of the lexical units they contain and the emotional variables they feature. In order to break this bottleneck, we here introduce a methodology for creating almost arbitrarily large emotion lexicons for any target language. Our app…
Bar Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Word sense induction (WSI) is the task of unsupervised clustering of word usages within a sentence to distinguish senses. Recent work obtain strong results by clustering lexical substitutes derived from pre-trained RNN language models (ELMo). Adapting the method to BERT improves the scores even further. We extend the previous method to support a dynamic rather than a fixed number of clusters as supported by other prominent methods, and propose a method for interpreting the resulting clusters by associating them with their most informative substitutes. We then perform extensive error analysis r…
Maharaja Surajmal Institute of Technology, GGSIPU（马哈拉贾苏拉杰马尔技术学院，GGSIPU）；Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi（德里英德拉普拉斯塔信息技术学院）；All India Institute of Medical Sciences（全印度医学科学学院）
Social media plays a pivotal role in disseminating news globally and acts as a platform for people to express their opinions on various topics. A wide variety of views accompanies COVID-19 vaccination drives across the globe, often colored by emotions, which change along with rising cases, approval of vaccines, and multiple factors discussed online. This study aims at analyzing the temporal evolution of different Emotion categories: Hesitation, Rage, Sorrow, Anticipation, Faith, and Contentment with Influencing Factors: Vaccine Rollout, Misinformation, Health Effects, and Inequities as lexical…
The effect of amplifiers, downtoners, and negations has been studied in general and particularly in the context of sentiment analysis. However, there is only limited work which aims at transferring the results and methods to discrete classes of emotions, e. g., joy, anger, fear, sadness, surprise, and disgust. For instance, it is not straight-forward to interpret which emotion the phrase "not happy" expresses. With this paper, we aim at obtaining a better understanding of such modifiers in the context of emotion-bearing words and their impact on document-level emotion classification, namely, m…
Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；Mininglamp Academy of Sciences（明略科学院）
Lexical simplification (LS) aims to replace complex words in a given sentence with their simpler alternatives of equivalent meaning, to simplify the sentence. Recently unsupervised lexical simplification approaches only rely on the complex word itself regardless of the given sentence to generate candidate substitutions, which will inevitably produce a large number of spurious candidates. In this paper, we propose a lexical simplification framework LSBert based on pretrained representation model Bert, that is capable of (1) making use of the wider context when both detecting the words in need o…
The categorization of emotion names, i.e., the grouping of emotion words that have similar emotional connotations together, is a key tool of Social Psychology used to explore people's knowledge about emotions. Without exception, the studies following that research line were based on the gauging of the perceived similarity between emotion names by the participants of the experiments. Here we propose and examine a new approach to study the categories of emotion names - the similarities between target emotion names are obtained by comparing the contexts in which they appear in texts retrieved fro…
With a growing interest in modeling inherent subjectivity in natural language, we present a linguistically-motivated process to understand and analyze the writing style of individuals from three perspectives: lexical, syntactic, and semantic. We discuss the stylistically expressive elements within each of these levels and use existing methods to quantify the linguistic intuitions related to some of these elements. We show that such a multi-level analysis is useful for developing a well-knit understanding of style - which is independent of the natural language task at hand, and also demonstrate…
When Emotion Becomes Trigger: Emotion-style dynamic Backdoor Attack Parasitising Large Language Models
School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Sichuan University（四川大学计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Computer Science, China West Normal University（西南大学计算机科学学院）；School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Lanzhou Jiaotong University（兰州交通大学电子信息工程学院）
Lexical Prompt Compression for Large Language Models: A Training-Free, Deterministic Pipeline with Empirical Pareto Analysis Across Eleven Task Categories
Bar-Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）；Meta AI Research（Meta人工智能研究院）；EHESS（社会科学高等学院）
Speech emotion conversion is the task of modifying the perceived emotion of a speech utterance while preserving the lexical content and speaker identity. In this study, we cast the problem of emotion conversion as a spoken language translation task. We use a decomposition of the speech signal into discrete learned representations, consisting of phonetic-content units, prosodic features, speaker, and emotion. First, we modify the speech content by translating the phonetic-content units to a target emotion, and then predict the prosodic features based on these units. Finally, the speech waveform…
Kozminski University（科兹明斯基大学）；University of Warsaw（华沙大学）
Sentiment and lexical analyses are widely used to detect depression or anxiety disorders. It has been documented that there are significant differences in the language used by a person with emotional disorders in comparison to a healthy individual. Still, the effectiveness of these lexical approaches could be improved further because the current analysis focuses on what the social media entries are about, and not how they are written. In this study, we focus on aspects in which these short texts are similar to each other, and how they were created. We present an innovative approach to the depr…
