PoETIC: A Re-framing of Context Dependent Emotion Detection

Nirmal Surange and Manish Shrivastava
International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad


Abstract

Emotion classification has been extensively studied, with numerous datasets enabling progress in both textual and multimodal settings. However, most existing text-based resources treat emotion as an utterance-level property, assuming that the emotional content is fully encoded in the sentence itself. This assumption is problematic: in the absence of paralinguistic cues such as prosody, facial expressions, or emojis, textual emotions are often highly context-dependent. Many utterances lack explicit emotion markers, and even when present, such cues may be overridden by broader situational context. Sentence-level emotion annotation, thus, is driven by the annotator's ability to imagine the context in which the given utterance would elicit a given emotion. An utterance may be able to express an emotion completely (Emotion Obvious), or it can express an emotion when imagined in a certain context (Emotion Plausible). Also, for an utterance, certain emotions might be implausible to express given the specific wording of a sentence (Emotion-Implausible). To address these issues, we create a new paradigm for emotion classification by categorizing utterance and emotion pairs into context-dependency classes. We present the PoETIC benchmark dataset, where sentences in the GoEmotions dataset are human-annotated for the three aforementioned classes across seven emotions (Fear, Anger, Sadness, Joy, Disgust, Surprise, and Neutral). We observe that gold-tagged emotions in GoEmotions do not have a clear correlation with human judgment with respect to the ability to express other emotions, given different contexts. Human annotators identify significantly more plausible emotions for a given utterance if asked to imagine a plausible context per utterance-emotion pair. We also present baselines using three popular large language models and two "small" language models in zero-shot and few-shot settings on the benchmark dataset.