Appraisal Theories for Emotion Classification in Text

Automatic emotion categorization has been predominantly formulated as text classification in which textual units are assigned to an emotion from a predefined inventory, for instance following the fundamental emotion classes proposed by Paul Ekman (fear, joy, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise) or Robert Plutchik (adding trust, anticipation). This approach ignores existing psychological theories to some degree, which provide explanations regarding the perception of events (for instance, that somebody experiences fear when they discover a snake because of the appraisal as being an unpleasant and non-controllable situation), even without having access to explicit reports what an experiencer of an emotion is feeling (for instance expressing this with the words "I am afraid."). Automatic classification approaches therefore need to learn properties of events as latent variables (for instance that the uncertainty and effort associated with discovering the snake leads to fear). With this paper, we propose to make such interpretations of events explicit, following theories of cognitive appraisal of events and show their potential for emotion classification when being encoded in classification models. Our results show that high quality appraisal dimension assignments in event descriptions lead to an improvement in the classification of discrete emotion categories.