Why Do You Feel This Way? Summarizing Triggers of Emotions in Social Media Posts

Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 9436 - 9453 December 7-11, 2022 ©2022 Association for Computational Linguistics Why Do You Feel This Way? Summarizing Triggers of Emotions in Social Media Posts Hongli Zhan∗1 Tiberiu Sosea∗2 Cornelia Caragea2 Junyi Jessy Li1 1Department of Linguistics, The University of Texas at Austin 2Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois Chicago {honglizhan,jessy}@utexas.edu {tsosea2,cornelia}@uic.edu Abstract Crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic con- tinuously threaten our world and emotionally affect billions of people worldwide in distinct ways. Understanding the triggers leading to people’s emotions is of crucial importance. So- cial media posts can be a good source of such analysis, yet these texts tend to be charged with multiple emotions, with triggers scatter- ing across multiple sentences. This paper takes a novel angle, namely, emotion detection and trigger summarization, aiming to both detect perceived emotions in text, and summarize events and their appraisals that trigger each emotion. To support this goal, we introduce COVIDET (Emotions and their Triggers dur- ing Covid-19), a dataset of ~1, 900 English Reddit posts related to COVID-19, which con- tains manual annotations of perceived emotions and abstractive summaries of their triggers de- scribed in the post. We develop strong baselines to jointly detect emotions and summarize emo- tion triggers. Our analyses show that COVIDET presents new challenges in emotion-specific summarization, as well as multi-emotion detec- tion in long social media posts. 1 Introduction Large-scale crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic continuously cause emotional turmoil worldwide. People are emotionally affected in different ways, e.g., online education has led to mental health is- sues among students (Akpınar et al., 2021) as well as parents (Cui et al., 2021); lock-down policies are protective for the vulnerable (Flaxman et al., 2020; Hsiang et al., 2020) while economically disastrous for many (Odii et al., 2021). Emotion analysis — both detecting emotion and understanding what triggers the emotion — brings invaluable insights both practically (e.g., for first responders, coun- selors, etc) and in scientific research (Arora et al., 2021; Uban et al., 2021). *Hongli Zhan and Tiberiu Sosea contributed equally. Reddit Post 1: My sibling is 19 and she constantly goes places with her friends and to there houses and its honestly stressing me out. 2: Our grandfather lives with us and he has dementia along with other health issues and my mom has diabetes and heart problems and I have autoimmune diseases & chronic health issues. 3: She also has asthma. 4: Its stressing me out because despite this she seems to not care about how badly it would affect all of us if we were to get the virus. 5: And sadly I feel like its not much I can do she literally doesn’t respect my mom and though I’m older she doesn’t respect me either. 6: Its so frustrating. Emotions and Abstractive Summaries of Triggers Emotion: anger Abstractive Summary of Trigger: My sister having absolutely no regard for any of our family’s health coupled with the fact …

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