CHEER-Ekman: Fine-grained Embodied Emotion Classification

Phan Anh Duong, Cat Luong, Divyesh Bommana, Tianyu Jiang


Abstract
Emotions manifest through physical experiences and bodily reactions, yet identifying such embodied emotions in text remains understudied. We present an embodied emotion classification dataset, CHEER-Ekman, extending the existing binary embodied emotion dataset with Ekman’s six basic emotion categories. Using automatic best-worst scaling with large language models, we achieve performance superior to supervised approaches on our new dataset. Our investigation reveals that simplified prompting instructions and chain-of-thought reasoning significantly improve emotion recognition accuracy, enabling smaller models to achieve competitive performance with larger ones.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-short.88
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1118–1131
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.acl-short.88/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Phan Anh Duong, Cat Luong, Divyesh Bommana, and Tianyu Jiang. 2025. CHEER-Ekman: Fine-grained Embodied Emotion Classification. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 1118–1131, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
CHEER-Ekman: Fine-grained Embodied Emotion Classification (Duong et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.acl-short.88.pdf