Towards a Generative Approach for Emotion Detection and Reasoning
<|reference_start|>Towards a Generative Approach for Emotion Detection and Reasoning: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in mathematical and commonsense reasoning tasks using chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting techniques. But can they perform emotional reasoning by concatenating `Let's think step-by-step' to the input prompt? In this paper we investigate this question along with introducing a novel approach to zero-shot emotion detection and emotional reasoning using LLMs. Existing state of the art zero-shot approaches rely on textual entailment models to choose the most appropriate emotion label for an input text. We argue that this strongly restricts the model to a fixed set of labels which may not be suitable or sufficient for many applications where emotion analysis is required. Instead, we propose framing the problem of emotion analysis as a generative question-answering (QA) task. Our approach uses a two step methodology of generating relevant context or background knowledge to answer the emotion detection question step-by-step. Our paper is the first work on using a generative approach to jointly address the tasks of emotion detection and emotional reasoning for texts. We evaluate our approach on two popular emotion detection datasets and also release the fine-grained emotion labels and explanations for further training and fine-tuning of emotional reasoning systems.<|reference_end|>
@article{bhaumik2024towards,
    title={Towards a Generative Approach for Emotion Detection and Reasoning},
    author={Ankita Bhaumik, Tomek Strzalkowski},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.04906},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2408.04906},
    primaryClass={cs.CL cs.AI}
}