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The WASSA 2023 shared task on predicting empathy, emotion and other personality traits consists of essays, conversations and articles in textual form and participants&#39; demographic information in numerical form. To address the tasks, our contributions include (1) converting numerical information into meaningful text information using appropriate templates, (2) summarising lengthy articles, and (3) augmenting training data by paraphrasing. To achieve these contributions, we leveraged two separate T5-based pre-trained transformers. We then fine-tuned pre-trained BERT, DistilBERT and ALBERT for predicting empathy and personality traits. We used the Optuna hyperparameter optimisation framework to fine-tune learning rates, batch sizes and weight initialisation. Our proposed system achieved its highest performance – a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.750 – on the conversation-level empathy prediction task. The system implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/hasan-rakibul/WASSA23-empathy-emotion.

ACL 2023

Curtin OCAI at WASSA 2023 Empathy, Emotion and Personality Shared Task: Demographic-Aware Prediction Using Multiple Transformers

wassa 2023

personality traits

empathy

prediction

demographic information

emotion

bert

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
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##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

The WASSA 2023 shared task on predicting empathy, emotion and other personality traits consists of essays, conversations and articles in textual form and participants' demographic information in numerical form. To address the tasks, our contributions include (1) converting numerical information into meaningful text information using appropriate templates, (2) summarising lengthy articles, and (3) augmenting training data by paraphrasing. To achieve these contributions, we leveraged two separate T5-based pre-trained transformers. We then fine-tuned pre-trained BERT, DistilBERT and ALBERT for predicting empathy and personality traits. We used the Optuna hyperparameter optimisation framework to fine-tune learning rates, batch sizes and weight initialisation. Our proposed system achieved its highest performance – a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.750 – on the conversation-level empathy prediction task. The system implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/hasan-rakibul/WASSA23-empathy-emotion.

workshop paper

In this paper, we present Team Hawk’s participation in Track 1 of the WASSA 2023 shared task. The objective of the task is to understand the empathy that emerges between individuals during their conversations. In our study, we developed a multi-tasking framework that is capable of automatically assessing empathy, intensity of emotion, and polarity of emotion within participants’ conversations. Our proposed core model extends the transformer architecture, utilizing two separate RoBERTabased encoders to encode both the articles and conversations. Subsequently, a sequence of self-attention, position-wise feed-forward, and dense layers are employed to predict the regression scores for the three sub-tasks: empathy, intensity of emotion, and polarity of emotion. Our best model achieved average Pearson’s correlation of 0.7710 (Empathy: 0.7843, Emotion Polarity: 0.7917, Emotion Intensity: 0.7381) on the released development set and 0.7250 (Empathy: 0.8090, Emotion Polarity: 0.7010, Emotion Intensity: 0.6650) on the released test set. These results earned us the 3rd position in the test set evaluation phase of Track 1.

Team_Hawk at WASSA 2023 Empathy, Emotion, and Personality Shared Task: Multi-tasking Multi-encoder based transformers for Empathy and Emotion Prediction in Conversations

This paper describes our proposed system design for the WASSA 2023 shared task 1. We propose a unified architecture of ensemble neural networks to integrate the original RoBERTa transformer with two sentiment-enhanced RoBERTa-Twitter and EmoBERTa models. For Track 1 at the speech-turn level, our best submission achieved an average Pearson correlation score of 0.7236, ranking fourth for empathy, emotion polarity and emotion intensity prediction. For Track 2 at the essay-level, our best submission obtained an average Pearson correlation score of 0.4178 for predicting empathy and distress scores, ranked first among all nine submissions.

NCUEE-NLP at WASSA 2023 Shared Task 1: Empathy and Emotion Prediction Using Sentiment-Enhanced RoBERTa Transformers

This research contributes to the task of predicting empathy and personality traits within dialogue, an important aspect of natural language processing, as part of our experimental work for the WASSA 2023 Empathy and Emotion Shared Task. For predicting empathy, emotion polarity, and emotion intensity on turns within a dialogue, we employ adapters trained on social media interactions labeled with empathy ratings in a stacked composition with the target task adapters. Furthermore, we embed demographic information to predict Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) subscales and Big Five Personality Traits utilizing BERT-based models. The results from our study provide valuable insights, contributing to advancements in understanding human behavior and interaction through text. Our team ranked 2nd on the personality and empathy prediction tasks, 4th on the interpersonal reactivity index, and 6th on the conversational task.

Domain Transfer for Empathy, Distress, and Personality Prediction

In this paper, we highlight our approach for the "WASSA 2023 Empathy and Emotion Shared Task". We present our approach for track 3 of the shared task which aims to identify emotions from text. Each sample in the dataset has one or more labels making it a multi-label classification task. We compared multiple transformer-based models by fine-tuning them for multi-label classification. Oversampling was used to overcome the class imbalance in the dataset. Ensembling techniques were used to improve the performance of the system. We obtained a macro F1-score of 0.5649 using XLNet on the test dataset in the official phase and secured rank 6 on the official leaderboard. During the post-competition phase, a threshold-based voting mechanism was performed on three models (Longformer, BERT, BigBird) that yielded the highest overall macro F1-score of 0.6605.

Converge at WASSA 2023 Empathy, Emotion and Personality Shared Task: A Transformer-based Approach for Multi-Label Emotion Classification

This paper presents our approach for the WASSA 2023 Empathy, Emotion and Personality Shared Task. Empathy and distress are human feelings that are implicitly expressed in natural discourses. Empathy and distress detection are crucial challenges in Natural Language Processing that can aid our understanding of conversations. The provided dataset consists of several long-text examples in the English language, with each example associated with a numeric score for empathy and distress. We experiment with several BERT-based models as a part of our approach. We also try various ensemble methods. Our final submission has a Pearson's r score of 0.346, placing us third in the empathy and distress detection subtask.

PICT-CLRL at WASSA 2023 Empathy, Emotion and Personality Shared Task: Empathy and Distress Detection using Ensembles of Transformer Models

This paper describes the approach that we used to take part in the multi-label multi- class emotion classification as Track 3 of the WASSA 2023 Empathy, Emotion and Personality Shared Task at ACL 2023. The overall goal of this track is to build models that can predict 8 classes (7 emotions + neutral) based on short English essays written in response to news article that talked about events perceived as harmful to people. We used OpenAI generative pretrained transformers with full-scale APIs for the emotion prediction task by fine-tuning a GPT-3 model and doing prompt engineering for zero-shot / few-shot learning with ChatGPT and GPT-4 models based on multiple experiments on the dev set. The most efficient method was fine-tuning a GPT-3 model which allowed us to beat our baseline character-based XGBoost Classifier and rank 2nd among all other participants by achieving a macro F1 score of 0.65 and a micro F1 score of 0.7 on the final blind test set.


Team Bias Busters at WASSA 2023 Empathy, Emotion and Personality Shared Task: Emotion Detection with Generative Pretrained Transformers

This presentation introduces the participation of team HIT-SCIR to the WASSA 2023 Shared Task on Empathy Detection and Emotion Classification and Personality Detection in Interactions. We focus on three tracks: Track 1 (Empathy and Emotion Prediction in Conversations, CONV), Track 2 (Empathy Prediction, EMP) and Track 3 (Emotion Classification, EMO), and designed three different models to address them separately. For Track 1, we designed a direct finetuning DeBERTa model for three regression tasks at the utterance-level. For Track 2, we designed a multi-task learning RoBERTa model for two regression tasks at the essay-level. For Track 3, we designed a RoBERTa model with data augmentation for the classification task at the essay-level. Finally, our team ranked 1st in the Track 1 (CONV), 5th in the Track 2 (EMP) and 3rd in the Track 3 (EMO) in the evaluation phase.

HIT-SCIR at WASSA 2023: Empathy and Emotion Analysis at the Utterance-Level and the Essay-Level

This Shared Task, “Emotion Classification from essays written in reaction to news articles,” is about predicting emotions from essay-level texts. The target labels consist of thirty-one categories of emotions, including individual and mixed sets of emotion categories, making it a multiclass classification problem. Our system based on transformer architecture (BERT-Base) scored the tenth rank out of 13 reported teams. Our experiments conclude that although FLAIR are powerful word representations built to capture out-of-vocabulary words, they are less effective than contextual embeddings when used for small and imbalanced datasets.

VISU at WASSA 2023 Shared Task: Detecting Emotions in Reaction to News Stories Using Transformers and Stacked Embeddings

Code-mixing refers to the phenomenon of using two or more languages interchangeably within a speech or discourse context. This practice is particularly prevalent on social media platforms, and determining the embedded affects in a code-mixed sentence remains as a challenging problem. In this submission we describe our system for WASSA 2023 Shared Task on Emotion Detection in English-Urdu code-mixed text. In our system we implement a multiclass emotion detection model with label space of 11 emotions. Samples are code-mixed English-Urdu text, where Urdu is written in romanised form. Our submission is limited to one of the subtasks - Multi Class classification and we leverage transformer-based Multilingual Large Language Models (MLLMs), XLM-RoBERTa and Indic-BERT. We fine-tune
MLLMs on the released data splits, with and without pre-processing steps (translation to english), for classifying texts into the appropriate emotion category. Our methods did not surpass the baseline, and our submission is ranked sixth
overall.

PrecogIIITH@WASSA2023: Emotion Detection for Urdu-English Code-mixed Text

In this era of digital communication and social media, texting and chatting among individuals occur mainly through code-mixed or Romanized versions of the native language prevalent in the region. The presence of Romanized and code-mixed language develops the need to build NLP systems in these domains to leverage the digital content for various use cases. This paper describes our contribution to the subtask MCEC of the shared task WASSA 2023:Shared Task on Multi-Label and Multi-Class Emotion Classification on Code-Mixed Text Messages. We explore how one can build sentence transformers models for low-resource languages using unsupervised data by leveraging contrastive learning techniques described in the SIMCSE paper and using the sentence transformer developed to build classification models using the SetFit approach. Additionally, we’ll publish our code and models on GitHub and HuggingFace, two open-source hosting services.

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Team_Hawk at WASSA 2023 Empathy, Emotion, and Personality Shared Task: Multi-tasking Multi-encoder based transformers for Empathy and Emotion Prediction in Conversations

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Domain Transfer for Empathy, Distress, and Personality Prediction