Multi-modal Emotion Prediction towards Gun Violence News

Abstract

We aim to develop methods for understanding how multimedia news exposure can affect people’s emotional responses, and we especially focus on news content related to gun violence, a very important yet polarizing issue in the U.S. We created the dataset NEmo+ by significantly extending the U.S. gun violence news-to-emotions dataset, BU-NEmo, from 320 to 1,297 news headline and lead image pairings and collecting 38,910 annotations in a large crowdsourcing experiment. In curating the NEmo+ dataset, we developed methods to identify news items that will trigger similar versus divergent emotional responses. For news items that trigger similar emotional responses, we compiled them into the NEmo+-Consensus dataset. We benchmark models on this dataset that predict a person’s dominant emotional response toward the target news item (single-label prediction). On the full NEmo+ dataset, containing news items that would lead to both differing and similar emotional responses, we also benchmark models for the novel task of predicting the distribution of evoked emotional responses in humans when presented with multi-modal news content. Our single-label and multi-label prediction models outperform baselines by large margins across several metrics.

 

Cite the paper:

  • Ge Gao, Sejin Paik, Carley Reardon, Yanling Zhao, Lei Guo, Prakash Ishwar, Margrit Betke, and Derry Tanti Wijaya. 2022. Prediction of People’s Emotional Response towards Multi-modal News. In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 364–374, Online only. Association for Computational Linguistics.