# Experiencer-Specific Emotion and Appraisal Prediction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.12078 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12078/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [GoEmotions: A Dataset of Fine-Grained Emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00547/) (2020)
- [Emotion Recognition in Conversation: Research Challenges, Datasets, and Recent Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02947/) (2019)
- [What Do Position Embeddings Learn? An Empirical Study of Pre-Trained Language Model Positional Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04903/) (2020)
- [Dimensional Modeling of Emotions in Text with Appraisal Theories: Corpus Creation, Annotation Reliability, and Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05238/) (2022)
- [GoodNewsEveryone: A Corpus of News Headlines Annotated with Emotions, Semantic Roles, and Reader Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.03184/) (2019)
- [Appraisal Theories for Emotion Classification in Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14155/) (2020)
- [Structured Sentiment Analysis as Dependency Graph Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14504/) (2021)
- [Crowdsourcing and Validating Event-focused Emotion Corpora for German and English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13618/) (2019)
- [A Survey on Aspect-Based Sentiment Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.14266/) (2022)
- [x-enVENT: A Corpus of Event Descriptions with Experiencer-specific Emotion and Appraisal Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10909/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Where are We in Event-centric Emotion Analysis? Bridging Emotion Role Labeling and Appraisal-based Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02092/) (2023)
- [Improving Language Models for Emotion Analysis: Insights from Cognitive Science](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10265/) (2024)
- [Exploratory Study into Relations between Cognitive Distortions and Emotional Appraisals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15979/) (2025)
- [Automatic Emotion Experiencer Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16731/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Emotion classification in NLP assigns emotions to texts, such as sentences or paragraphs. With texts like "I felt guilty when he cried", focusing on the sentence level disregards the standpoint of each participant in the situation: the writer ("I") and the other entity ("he") could in fact have different affective states. The emotions of different entities have been considered only partially in emotion semantic role labeling, a task that relates semantic roles to emotion cue words. Proposing a related task, we narrow the focus on the experiencers of events, and assign an emotion (if any holds) to each of them. To this end, we represent each emotion both categorically and with appraisal variables, as a psychological access to explaining why a person develops a particular emotion. On an event description corpus, our experiencer-aware models of emotions and appraisals outperform the experiencer-agnostic baselines, showing that disregarding event participants is an oversimplification for the emotion detection task.