Why Do You Feel This Way? Summarizing Triggers of Emotions in Social Media Posts

Crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic continuously threaten our world and emotionally affect billions of people worldwide in distinct ways. Understanding the triggers leading to people's emotions is of crucial importance. Social media posts can be a good source of such analysis, yet these texts tend to be charged with multiple emotions, with triggers scattering across multiple sentences. This paper takes a novel angle, namely, emotion detection and trigger summarization, aiming to both detect perceived emotions in text, and summarize events and their appraisals that trigger each emotion. To support this goal, we introduce COVIDET (Emotions and their Triggers during Covid-19), a dataset of 1, 900 English Reddit posts related to COVID-19, which contains manual annotations of perceived emotions and abstractive summaries of their triggers described in the post. We develop strong baselines to jointly detect emotions and summarize emotion triggers. Our analyses show that COVIDET presents new challenges in emotion-specific summarization, as well as multi-emotion detection in long social media posts. * Hongli Zhan and Tiberiu Sosea contributed equally. Reddit Post 1: My sibling is 19 and she constantly goes places with her friends and to there houses and its honestly stressing me out. 2: Our grandfather lives with us and he has dementia along with other health issues and my mom has diabetes and heart problems and I have autoimmune diseases & chronic health issues. 3: She also has asthma. 4: Its stressing me out because despite this she seems to not care about how badly it would affect all of us if we were to get the virus. 5: And sadly I feel like its not much I can do she literally doesn't respect my mom and though I'm older she doesn't respect me either. 6: Its so frustrating.