Annotation of Valence Unfolding in Spoken Personal Narratives

Aniruddha Tammewar, Franziska Braun, Gabriel Roccabruna, Sebastian Bayerl, Korbinian Riedhammer, Giuseppe Riccardi


Abstract
Personal Narrative (PN) is the recollection of individuals’ life experiences, events, and thoughts along with the associated emotions in the form of a story. Compared to other genres such as social media texts or microblogs, where people write about experienced events or products, the spoken PNs are complex to analyze and understand. They are usually long and unstructured, involving multiple and related events, characters as well as thoughts and emotions associated with events, objects, and persons. In spoken PNs, emotions are conveyed by changing the speech signal characteristics as well as the lexical content of the narrative. In this work, we annotate a corpus of spoken personal narratives, with the emotion valence using discrete values. The PNs are segmented into speech segments, and the annotators annotate them in the discourse context, with values on a 5-point bipolar scale ranging from -2 to +2 (0 for neutral). In this way, we capture the unfolding of the PNs events and changes in the emotional state of the narrator. We perform an in-depth analysis of the inter-annotator agreement, the relation between the label distribution w.r.t. the stimulus (positive/negative) used for the elicitation of the narrative, and compare the segment-level annotations to a baseline continuous annotation. We find that the neutral score plays an important role in the agreement. We observe that it is easy to differentiate the positive from the negative valence while the confusion with the neutral label is high. Keywords: Personal Narratives, Emotion Annotation, Segment Level Annotation
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.757
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
7004–7013
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.757
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aniruddha Tammewar, Franziska Braun, Gabriel Roccabruna, Sebastian Bayerl, Korbinian Riedhammer, and Giuseppe Riccardi. 2022. Annotation of Valence Unfolding in Spoken Personal Narratives. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 7004–7013, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Annotation of Valence Unfolding in Spoken Personal Narratives (Tammewar et al., LREC 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2022.lrec-1.757.pdf