A Corpus-Based Comparison of two Approaches for Emotion Annotation in French Texts

Valentina Dragos, Delphine Battistelli


Abstract
Emotion annotation in texts remains a challenging task in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), as, unlike voice or images, texts might not only contain peculiar cues to express emotions. Methods for emotion annotation are based on lexicons or on machine learning techniques which are based on the use of manually annotated corpora. This paper aims to explore if and how the combination of these two types of methods might be useful for the annotation of emotions in texts. Four data sets are used for comparison of the two approaches, and then to investigate to what extent the results are distinct or complementary on three aspects: (i) identification of emotional sentences; (ii) identification of emotion categories; (iii) identification of one specific mode of expression of emotions called "behavioral emotions" (e.g. shout, cry). Findings show that not all emotions are equally easy to annotate, and, most specifically, the learning-based approach tends to over detect Admiration.
Anthology ID:
2026.cas-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of Computational Affective Science (CAS) @ LREC 2026
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Christopher Bagdon, Krishnapriya Vishnubhotla, Kristen A. Lindquist, Lyle Ungar, Roman Klinger, Saif M. Mohammad
Venues:
CAS | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
38–46
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-cas-04
DOI:
10.63317/49jyy8yh5ht8
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Valentina Dragos and Delphine Battistelli. 2026. A Corpus-Based Comparison of two Approaches for Emotion Annotation in French Texts. In Proceedings of Computational Affective Science (CAS) @ LREC 2026, pages 38–46, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
A Corpus-Based Comparison of two Approaches for Emotion Annotation in French Texts (Dragos & Battistelli, CAS 2026)
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