Annotation of Emotion Carriers in Personal Narratives

We are interested in the problem of understanding personal narratives (PN) - spoken or written - recollections of facts, events, and thoughts. In PN, emotion carriers are the speech or text segments that best explain the emotional state of the user. Such segments may include entities, verb or noun phrases. Advanced automatic understanding of PNs requires not only the prediction of the user emotional state but also to identify which events (e.g. "the loss of relative" or "the visit of grandpa") or people ( e.g. "the old group of high school mates") carry the emotion manifested during the personal recollection. This work proposes and evaluates an annotation model for identifying emotion carriers in spoken personal narratives. Compared to other text genres such as news and microblogs, spoken PNs are particularly challenging because a narrative is usually unstructured, involving multiple sub-events and characters as well as thoughts and associated emotions perceived by the narrator. In this work, we experiment with annotating emotion carriers from speech transcriptions in the Ulm State-of-Mind in Speech (USoMS) corpus, a dataset of German PNs. We believe this resource could be used for experiments in the automatic extraction of emotion carriers from PN, a task that could provide further advancements in narrative understanding.