# Language Models (Mostly) Do Not Consider Emotion Triggers When Predicting Emotion

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09602 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09602/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Nov 2023.

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

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [A Unified Approach to Interpreting Model Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07874/) (2017)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [GoEmotions: A Dataset of Fine-Grained Emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00547/) (2020)
- [Crowdsourcing a Word-Emotion Association Lexicon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.6297/) (2013)
- [Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction: A New Task to Emotion Analysis in Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01267/) (2019)
- [EmoBERTa: Speaker-Aware Emotion Recognition in Conversation with RoBERTa](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12009/) (2021)
- [DENS: A Dataset for Multi-class Emotion Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11769/) (2019)
- [Detecting Perceived Emotions in Hurricane Disasters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14299/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Extractive Summarization of Emotion Triggers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01444/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Revise, Reason, and Recognize: LLM-Based Emotion Recognition via Emotion-Specific Prompts and ASR Error Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15551/) (2024)
- [Fluent but Unfeeling: The Emotional Blind Spots of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.09593/) (2025)
- [Why We Feel What We Feel: Joint Detection of Emotions and Their Opinion Triggers in E-commerce](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04708/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Situations and events evoke emotions in humans, but to what extent do they inform the prediction of emotion detection models? This work investigates how well human-annotated emotion triggers correlate with features that models deemed salient in their prediction of emotions. First, we introduce a novel dataset EmoTrigger, consisting of 900 social media posts sourced from three different datasets; these were annotated by experts for emotion triggers with high agreement. Using EmoTrigger, we evaluate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to identify emotion triggers, and conduct a comparative analysis of the features considered important for these tasks between LLMs and fine-tuned models. Our analysis reveals that emotion triggers are largely not considered salient features for emotion prediction models, instead there is intricate interplay between various features and the task of emotion detection.