Automatic Annotation of Dream Report’s Emotional Content with Large Language Models
Lorenzo Bertolini, Valentina Elce, Adriana Michalak, Hanna-Sophia Widhoelzl, Giulio Bernardi, Julie Weeds
Abstract
In the field of dream research, the study of dream content typically relies on the analysis of verbal reports provided by dreamers upon awakening from their sleep. This task is classically performed through manual scoring provided by trained annotators, at a great time expense. While a consistent body of work suggests that natural language processing (NLP) tools can support the automatic analysis of dream reports, proposed methods lacked the ability to reason over a report’s full context and required extensive data pre-processing. Furthermore, in most cases, these methods were not validated against standard manual scoring approaches. In this work, we address these limitations by adopting large language models (LLMs) to study and replicate the manual annotation of dream reports, using a mixture of off-the-shelf and bespoke approaches, with a focus on references to reports’ emotions. Our results show that the off-the-shelf method achieves a low performance probably in light of inherent linguistic differences between reports collected in different (groups of) individuals. On the other hand, the proposed bespoke text classification method achieves a high performance, which is robust against potential biases. Overall, these observations indicate that our approach could find application in the analysis of large dream datasets and may favour reproducibility and comparability of results across studies.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.clpsych-1.7
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2024)
- Month:
- March
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- St. Julians, Malta
- Editors:
- Andrew Yates, Bart Desmet, Emily Prud’hommeaux, Ayah Zirikly, Steven Bedrick, Sean MacAvaney, Kfir Bar, Molly Ireland, Yaakov Ophir
- Venues:
- CLPsych | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 92–107
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.clpsych-1.7
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Lorenzo Bertolini, Valentina Elce, Adriana Michalak, Hanna-Sophia Widhoelzl, Giulio Bernardi, and Julie Weeds. 2024. Automatic Annotation of Dream Report’s Emotional Content with Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2024), pages 92–107, St. Julians, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Automatic Annotation of Dream Report’s Emotional Content with Large Language Models (Bertolini et al., CLPsych-WS 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.clpsych-1.7.pdf