Annotation of Complex Emotions in Real-Life Dialogues: The Case of Empathy
Authors: Morena Danieli, Giuseppe Riccardi, Firoj Alam (Università di Trento, 2014)
Topic: Sentiment, Emotion, Irony, Hate

Abstract
In this paper we discuss the problem of an-notating emotions in real- life spoken conversations by investigat- ing the special case of empathy. We pro- pose an annotation model based on the situated theories of emotions. The anno- tation scheme is directed to ob-serve the natural unfolding of empathy during the conversations. The key component of the protocol is the identification of the anno- tation unit based both on linguistic and paralinguistic cues. In the last part of the paper we evaluate the reliability of the annotation model.

Introduction
The work we present is part of a research project aiming to provide scientific evidence for the sit- uated nature of emotional processes. In particular we investigate the case of complex social emo- tions, like empathy, by seeing them as relational events that are recognized by observers on the basis of their unfolding in human interactions. The ultimate goals of our research project are a) understanding the multidimensional signals of empathy in human conversations, and b) generat- ing a computational model of basic and complex emotions. A fundamental requirement for build- ing such computational systems is the reliability of the annotation model adopted for coding real life conversations. Therefore, in this paper, we will focus on the annotation scheme that we are using in our project by illustrating the case of empathy annotation. Empathy is often defined by metaphors that evoke the emotional or intellectual ability to identify another person’s emotional states, and/or to understand states of mind of the others. The word “empathy” was introduced in the psychological literature by Titchener in 1909 for translating the German term “Einfühlung”. Nowadays it is a common held opinion that empathy encompasses several human interaction abilities. The concept of empathy has been deeply investigated by cognitive scientists and neuroscientists, who proposed the hypothesis according to which empathy underpins the social competence of reconstructing the psychic processes of another person on the basis of the possible identification with his/her internal world and actions (Sperber & Wilson, 2002; Gallese, 2003). Despite the wide use of the notion of empathy in the psychological research, the concept is still vague and difficult to measure. Among psychologists there is little consensus about which signals subjects rely on for recognizing and echoing empathic responses. Also the uses of the concept by the computational attempts to repro-duce empathic behavior in virtual agents seem to be suffering due to the lack of operational definitions. Since the goal of our research is addressing the problem of automatic recognition of emotions in real life situations, we need an operational model of complex emotions, including empathy, focused on the unfolding of the emotional events. Our contribution to the design of such a model assumes that processing the discriminative characteristics of acoustic, linguistic, and psycholinguistic levels of the signals can support the automatic recognition of empathy in situated human conversations. The paper is organized as follows: in the next Section we introduce the situated model of emotions underlying our approach, and its possible impact on emotion annotation tasks. In Section 3 we describe our annotation model, its empirical bases, and reliability evaluation. Finally, we discuss the results of lexical features analysis and ranking

Conclusion
In this paper we propose a protocol for annotat- ing complex social emotions in real-life conver- sations by illustrating the special case of empa- thy. The definition of our annotation scheme is empirically-driven and compatible with the situ- ated models of emotions. The difficult goal of annotating the unfolding of the emotional pro- cesses in conversations has been approached by capturing the transitions between neutral and emotionally connoted speech events as those transitions manifest themselves in the melodic variations of the speech signals.