---
language: it
license: mit
tags:
- sentiment
- Italian
---

# FEEL-IT: Emotion and Sentiment Classification for the Italian Language
## Abstract

Sentiment analysis is a common task to understand people's reactions online. Still, we often need more nuanced information: is the post negative because the user is angry or because they are sad?
An abundance of approaches has been introduced for tackling both tasks. However, at least for Italian, they all treat only one of the tasks at a time. We introduce *FEEL-IT*, a novel benchmark corpus of Italian Twitter posts annotated with four basic emotions: **anger, fear, joy, sadness**. By collapsing them, we can also do **sentiment analysis**. We evaluate our corpus on benchmark datasets for both emotion and sentiment classification, obtaining competitive results.
We release an [open-source Python library](https://github.com/MilaNLProc/feel-it), so researchers can use a model trained on FEEL-IT for inferring both sentiments and emotions from Italian text.

| Model                       | Download |
| ------                      | -------------------------|
| `feel-it-italian-sentiment` | [Link](https://huggingface.co/MilaNLProc/feel-it-italian-sentiment) |
| `feel-it-italian-emotion`   | [Link](https://huggingface.co/MilaNLProc/feel-it-italian-emotion) |


## Model

The *feel-it-italian-sentiment* model performs **sentiment analysis** on Italian. We fine-tuned the [UmBERTo model](https://huggingface.co/Musixmatch/umberto-commoncrawl-cased-v1) on our new dataset (i.e., FEEL-IT) obtaining state-of-the-art performances on different benchmark corpus.

## Data

Our data has been collected by annotating tweets from a broad range of topics. In total, we have 2037 tweets annotated with an emotion label. More details can be found in our paper (preprint available soon).

## Performance

We evaluate our performance using [SENTIPOLC16 Evalita](http://www.di.unito.it/~tutreeb/sentipolc-evalita16/). We collapsed the FEEL-IT classes into 2 by mapping joy to the *positive* class and anger, fear and sadness into the *negative* class. We compare three different training dataset combinations to understand whether it is better to train on FEEL-IT, SP16, or both by testing on the SP16 test set.


This dataset comes with a training set and a testing set and thus we can compare the performance of different training datasets on the SENTIPOLC test set. 

We use the fine-tuned UmBERTo model. The results show that FEEL-IT can provide better results on the SENTIPOLC test set than those that can be obtained with the SENTIPOLC training set. 

| Training Dataset | Macro-F1 | Accuracy
| ------ | ------ |------ |
| SENTIPOLC16 | 0.80 | 0.81 |
| FEEL-IT | **0.81** | **0.84**  |
| FEEL-IT+SentiPolc | 0.81 | 0.82

## Usage

```python
import torch
import numpy as np 
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForSequenceClassification

# Load model and tokenizer
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("MilaNLProc/feel-it-italian-sentiment")
model = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained("MilaNLProc/feel-it-italian-sentiment")

sentence = 'Oggi sono proprio contento!'
inputs = tokenizer(sentence, return_tensors="pt")

# Call the model and get the logits
labels = torch.tensor([1]).unsqueeze(0)  # Batch size 1
outputs = model(**inputs, labels=labels)
loss, logits = outputs[:2]
logits = logits.squeeze(0)

# Extract probabilities
proba = torch.nn.functional.softmax(logits, dim=0)

# Unpack the tensor to obtain negative and positive probabilities
negative, positive = proba
print(f"Probabilities: Negative {np.round(negative.item(),4)} - Positive {np.round(positive.item(),4)}")
```

## Citation
Please use the following bibtex entry if you use this model in your project:
```
@inproceedings{bianchi2021feel,
    title = {{"FEEL-IT: Emotion and Sentiment Classification for the Italian Language"}},
    author = "Bianchi, Federico and Nozza, Debora and Hovy, Dirk",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis",
    year = "2021",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
}
```