Toward Dimensional Emotion Detection from Categorical Emotion Annotations

We propose a framework which makes a model predict fine-grained dimensional emotions (valence-arousal-dominance, VAD) trained on corpus annotated with coarse-grained categorical emotions. We train a model by minimizing EMD distances between predicted VAD score distribution and \textit{sorted} categorical emotion distributions in terms of VAD, as a proxy of target VAD score distributions. With our model, we can simultaneously classify a given sentence to categorical emotions as well as predict VAD scores. We use pre-trained BERT-Large and fine-tune on SemEval dataset (11 categorical emotions) and evaluate on EmoBank (VAD dimensional emotions), in order to show our approach reaches comparable performance to that of the state-of-the-art classifiers in categorical emotion classification task and significant positive correlations with ground truth VAD scores. Also, if one continues training our model with supervision of VAD labels, it outperforms state-of-the-art VAD regression models. We further present examples showing our model can annotate emotional words suitable for a given text even those words are not seen as categorical labels during training.