Emotion Train at SemEval-2025 Task 11: Comparing Generative and Discriminative Models in Emotion Recognition

Anastasiia Demidova, Injy Hamed, Teresa Lynn, Thamar Solorio


Abstract
The emotion recognition task has become increasingly popular as it has a wide range of applications in many fields, such as mental health, product management, and population mood state monitoring. SemEval 2025 Task 11 Track A framed the emotion recognition problem as a multi-label classification task. This paper presents our proposed system submissions in the following languages: English, Algerian and Moroccan Arabic, Brazilian and Mozambican Portuguese, German, Spanish, Nigerian-Pidgin, Russian, and Swedish. Here, we compare the emotion-detecting abilities of generative and discriminative pre-trained language models, exploring multiple approaches, including curriculum learning, in-context learning, and instruction and few-shot fine-tuning. We also propose an extended architecture method with a feature fusion technique enriched with emotion scores and a self-attention mechanism. We find that BERT-based models fine-tuned on data of a corresponding language achieve the best results across multiple languages for multi-label text-based emotion classification, outperforming both baseline and generative models.
Anthology ID:
2025.semeval-1.133
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Sara Rosenthal, Aiala Rosá, Debanjan Ghosh, Marcos Zampieri
Venues:
SemEval | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1004–1014
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/transition-to-people-yaml/2025.semeval-1.133/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anastasiia Demidova, Injy Hamed, Teresa Lynn, and Thamar Solorio. 2025. Emotion Train at SemEval-2025 Task 11: Comparing Generative and Discriminative Models in Emotion Recognition. In Proceedings of the 19th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2025), pages 1004–1014, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Emotion Train at SemEval-2025 Task 11: Comparing Generative and Discriminative Models in Emotion Recognition (Demidova et al., SemEval 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/transition-to-people-yaml/2025.semeval-1.133.pdf