Annotation and modeling of emotions in a textual corpus: an evaluative approach

Abstract: Emotion is a crucial phenomenon in the functioning of human beings in society. However, it remains a widely open subject, particularly in its textual manifestations. This paper examines an industrial corpus manually annotated following an evaluative approach to emotion. This theoretical framework, which is currently underutilized, offers a different perspective that complements traditional approaches. Noting that the annotations we collected exhibit significant disagreement, we hypothesized that they nonetheless follow stable statistical trends. Using LLMs trained on these annotations, we demonstrate that it is possible to model the labeling process and that variability is driven by underlying linguistic features. Conversely, our results indicate that LLMs seem capable of distinguishing emotional situations based on evaluative criteria.