# Topic Bias in Emotion Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.09043 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09043/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection for Dimension Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03426/) (2018)
- [Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.07187/) (2016)
- [BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05794/) (2022)
- [DailyDialog: A Manually Labelled Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03957/) (2017)
- [GoEmotions: A Dataset of Fine-Grained Emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00547/) (2020)
- [Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01144/) (2021)
- [Measuring Bias in Contextualized Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.07337/) (2019)
- [Evaluating Gender Bias in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00591/) (2019)
- [RedditBias: A Real-World Resource for Bias Evaluation and Debiasing of Conversational Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03521/) (2021)
- [Predictive Biases in Natural Language Processing Models: A Conceptual Framework and Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.11078/) (2019)
- [Unlearn Dataset Bias in Natural Language Inference by Fitting the Residual](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10763/) (2019)
- [Accelerated Hierarchical Density Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.07321/) (2017)
- [Reducing Gender Bias in Word-Level Language Models with a Gender-Equalizing Loss Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12801/) (2019)
- [Dimensional Modeling of Emotions in Text with Appraisal Theories: Corpus Creation, Annotation Reliability, and Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05238/) (2022)
- [Appraisal Theories for Emotion Classification in Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14155/) (2020)
- [Crowdsourcing and Validating Event-focused Emotion Corpora for German and English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13618/) (2019)
- [On Cross-Dataset Generalization in Automatic Detection of Online Abuse](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07414/) (2020)
- [From Once Upon a Time to Happily Ever After: Tracking Emotions in Novels and Fairy Tales](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1309.5909/) (2013)
- [Eliminating Sentiment Bias for Aspect-Level Sentiment Classification with Unsupervised Opinion Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02403/) (2021)
- [Argument from Old Man's View: Assessing Social Bias in Argumentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12014/) (2020)
- [Attending the Emotions to Detect Online Abusive Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03100/) (2019)
- [APPReddit: a Corpus of Reddit Posts Annotated for Appraisal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15627/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Emotion corpora are typically sampled based on keyword/hashtag search or by asking study participants to generate textual instances. In any case, these corpora are not uniform samples representing the entirety of a domain. We hypothesize that this practice of data acquisition leads to unrealistic correlations between overrepresented topics in these corpora that harm the generalizability of models. Such topic bias could lead to wrong predictions for instances like "I organized the service for my aunt's funeral." when funeral events are over-represented for instances labeled with sadness, despite the emotion of pride being more appropriate here. In this paper, we study this topic bias both from the data and the modeling perspective. We first label a set of emotion corpora automatically via topic modeling and show that emotions in fact correlate with specific topics. Further, we see that emotion classifiers are confounded by such topics. Finally, we show that the established debiasing method of adversarial correction via gradient reversal mitigates the issue. Our work points out issues with existing emotion corpora and that more representative resources are required for fair evaluation of models predicting affective concepts from text.