The ABBE Corpus: Animate Beings Being Emotional

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 (κ), indicating excellent agreement. We describe in detail our annotation scheme and procedure, and also release the corpus for use by other researchers.

情感检测是一项成熟的自然语言处理（Natural Language Processing，以下简称NLP）任务，在文本理解领域已被证实具备实用价值。然而，基础情感检测任务往往遗漏了一项关键信息，即所讨论情感的感受主体究竟是谁。例如，该情感的持有者可能是文本作者、叙述者或某一角色；也可能是受众应当共情感受到的情感，甚至无法归因于任何特定主体——比如当情感本身成为讨论主题时。本研究发布ABBE语料库（Animate Beings Being Emotional），这是一个全新的双标注语料库，能够针对一类特定的情感感受主体——即文本所描述世界中的有生命主体——捕捉上述关键信息。此类语料库可用于开发旨在建模或理解此类特定表达情感的系统。本语料库源自英语小说语料库（Corpus of English Novels），包含30个章节，总计134,513个词，涵盖了归属于2,227个有生命主体的2,010组独特情感表达。所有情感表达均按照普卢奇克（Plutchik）的八分类情感模型进行分类，本次标注的整体标注者间一致性达到0.83的科恩kappa系数（κ），表明标注一致性极佳。本文详细阐述了本次的标注方案与标注流程，并公开该语料库以供其他研究人员使用。