HappyDB: A Corpus of 100,000 Crowdsourced Happy Moments

HappyDB: A Corpus of 100,000 Crowdsourced Happy Moments Akari Asai∗, Sara Evensen†, Behzad Golshan‡, Alon Halevy‡, Vivian Li‡ Andrei Lopatenko‡, Daniela Stepanov‡, Yoshihiko Suhara‡, Wang-Chiew Tan‡, Yinzhan Xu† ∗Univ. of Tokyo, †MIT, ‡Recruit Institute of Technology akari-asai@g.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp, {sevensen, xyzhan}@mit.edu, {behzad, alon, vivian, andrei, daniela, suharay, wangchiew}@recruit.ai Abstract The science of happiness is an area of positive psychology concerned with understanding what behaviors make people happy in a sustainable fashion. Recently, there has been interest in developing technologies that help incorporate the findings of the science of happiness into users’ daily lives by steering them towards behaviors that increase happiness. With the goal of building technology that can understand how people express their happy moments in text, we crowd-sourced HappyDB, a corpus of 100,000 happy moments that we make publicly available. This paper describes HappyDB and its properties, and outlines several important NLP problems that can be studied with the help of the corpus. We also apply several state-of-the-art analysis techniques to analyze HappyDB. Our results demonstrate the need for deeper NLP techniques to be developed which makes HappyDB an exciting resource for follow-on research. Keywords: science of happiness, positive psychology, happyDB corpus, crowdsourcing 1. Introduction The science of happiness is an area of positive psychology that studies the factors that sustain people’s happiness over time (Seligman, 2011; Fredrickson, 2009; Lyubomirsky, 2008). One of the interesting findings of the field (Diener et al., 1999) is that while 50% of our happiness is geneti- cally determined, and only 10% of it is determined by our life circumstances (e.g., finances, job, material belongings), 40% of our happiness is determined by behaviors that are under our control. Examples of such behaviors include in- vesting in long-term personal relationships, bonding with loved ones, doing meaningful work, and caring for one’s body and mind. Consequently, positive psychologists have focused on devising methods to steer people towards those behaviors. Fostering happiness has also received attention at the national policy level – in a recent interview (Murthy, 2016) the U.S. Surgeon General claimed that fostering hap- piness is an important priority as one of the main ways to prevent disease and live a longer, healthier life. Naturally, there has been recent interest to develop tech- nologies that help users incorporate the findings of the sci- ence of happiness into their daily lives. Current applica- tions that pursue this goal generally fall into one of the two categories: (1) applications that suggest relevant content to the users based on their answers to a predefined set of ques- tions (Killingsworth, 2017; Happify, 2017; Happier, 2017) or (2) applications in which users can log their emotions in a journaling-style environment but that content is available mostly for their own reflection (Bliss, 2017; Mojo, 2017; DayOne, 2017). Our work has been to develop a journal-like application where users express their happy moments using their own language, thereby allowing for more nuance in their de- scription of what makes them happy. The ultimate goal of our app is that it should understand from …

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