While the recognition of positive/negative sentiment in text is an established task with many standard data sets and well developed methodologies, the recognition of more nuanced affect has received less attention, and in particular, there are very few publicly available gold standard annotated resources. To address this lack, we present a series of emotion annotation studies on tweets culminating in a publicly available collection of 2,019 tweets with scores on four emotion dimensions: valence, arousal, dominance and surprise, following the emotion representation model identified by Fontaine et.al. (Fontaine et al., 2007). Further, we make a comparison of relative vs. absolute annotation schemes. We find improved annotator agreement with a relative annotation scheme (comparisons) on a dimensional emotion model over a categorical annotation scheme on Ekman’s six basic emotions (Ekman et al., 1987), however when we compare inter-annotator agreement for comparisons with agreement for a rating scale annotation scheme (both with the same dimensional emotion model), we find improved inter-annotator agreement with rating scales, challenging a common belief that relative judgements are more reliable.
@InProceedings{WOOD18.61, author = {Ian Wood and John Philip McCrae and Vladimir Andryushechkin and Paul Buitelaar}, title = "{A Comparison Of Emotion Annotation Schemes And A New Annotated Data Set}", booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {May 7-12, 2018}, address = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference chair) and Khalid Choukri and Christopher Cieri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Koiti Hasida and Hitoshi Isahara and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Hélène Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis and Takenobu Tokunaga}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {979-10-95546-00-9}, language = {english} }