BRIGHTER: BRIdging the Gap in Human-Annotated Textual Emotion Recognition Datasets for 28 Languages
Abstract
People worldwide use language in subtle and complex ways to express emotions. Although emotion recognition--an umbrella term for several NLP tasks--impacts various applications within NLP and beyond, most work in this area has focused on high-resource languages. This has led to significant disparities in research efforts and proposed solutions, particularly for under-resourced languages, which often lack high-quality annotated datasets. In this paper, we present BRIGHTER--a collection of multi-labeled, emotion-annotated datasets in 28 different languages and across several domains. BRIGHTER primarily covers low-resource languages from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, with instances labeled by fluent speakers. We highlight the challenges related to the data collection and annotation processes, and then report experimental results for monolingual and crosslingual multi-label emotion identification, as well as emotion intensity recognition. We analyse the variability in performance across languages and text domains, both with and without the use of LLMs, and show that the BRIGHTER datasets represent a meaningful step towards addressing the gap in text-based emotion recognition.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2502.11926,
title = {BRIGHTER: BRIdging the Gap in Human-Annotated Textual Emotion Recognition Datasets for 28 Languages},
author = {Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad and Nedjma Ousidhoum and Idris Abdulmumin and Jan Philip Wahle and Terry Ruas and Meriem Beloucif and Christine de Kock and Nirmal Surange and Daniela Teodorescu and Ibrahim Said Ahmad and David Ifeoluwa Adelani and Alham Fikri Aji and Felermino D. M. A. Ali and Ilseyar Alimova and Vladimir Araujo and Nikolay Babakov and Naomi Baes and Ana-Maria Bucur and Andiswa Bukula and Guanqun Cao and Rodrigo Tufino Cardenas and Rendi Chevi and Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke and Alexandra Ciobotaru and Daryna Dementieva and Murja Sani Gadanya and Robert Geislinger and Bela Gipp and Oumaima Hourrane and Oana Ignat and Falalu Ibrahim Lawan and Rooweither Mabuya and Rahmad Mahendra and Vukosi Marivate and Alexander Panchenko and Andrew Piper and Charles Henrique Porto Ferreira and Vitaly Protasov and Samuel Rutunda and Manish Shrivastava and Aura Cristina Udrea and Lilian Diana Awuor Wanzare and Sophie Wu and Florian Valentin Wunderlich and Hanif Muhammad Zhafran and Tianhui Zhang and Yi Zhou and Saif M. Mohammad},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.11926},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Accepted at ACL2025 (Main)