The ABBE Corpus: Animate Beings Being Emotional
This provides a resource for developing systems to model emotions of animate beings in text, but it is incremental as it builds on existing emotion detection tasks.
The authors tackled the problem of identifying who experiences emotions in text by creating the ABBE corpus, which contains 2,010 emotion expressions from 134,513 words with an inter-annotator agreement of 0.83 Cohen's Kappa.
Emotion detection is an established NLP task of demonstrated utility for text understanding. However, basic emotion detection leaves out key information, namely, who is experiencing the emotion in question. For example, it may be the author, the narrator, or a character; or the emotion may correspond to something the audience is supposed to feel, or even be unattributable to a specific being, e.g., when emotions are being discussed per se. We provide the ABBE corpus -- Animate Beings Being Emotional -- a new double-annotated corpus of texts that captures this key information for one class of emotion experiencer, namely, animate beings in the world described by the text. Such a corpus is useful for developing systems that seek to model or understand this specific type of expressed emotion. Our corpus contains 30 chapters, comprising 134,513 words, drawn from the Corpus of English Novels, and contains 2,010 unique emotion expressions attributable to 2,227 animate beings. The emotion expressions are categorized according to Plutchik's 8-category emotion model, and the overall inter-annotator agreement for the annotations was 0.83 Cohen's Kappa, indicating excellent agreement. We describe in detail our annotation scheme and procedure, and also release the corpus for use by other researchers.