Work

Understanding Disagreement: An Annotation Study of Sentiment and Emotional Language in Environmental Communication

Year: 2025

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Emotional language is central to how environmental issues are communicated and received by the public.To better understand how such language is interpreted, we conducted an annotation study on sentiment and emotional language in texts from the environmental activist group Extinction Rebellion.The annotation process revealed substantial disagreement among annotators, highlighting the complexity and subjectivity involved in interpreting emotional language.In this paper, we analyze the sources of these disagreements, offering insights into how individual perspectives shape annotation outcomes.Our work contributes to ongoing discussions on perspectivism in NLP and emphasizes the importance of humancentered approaches and citizen science in analyzing environmental communication.

Source: Linguistic Annotation Workshop

DOI: 10.18653/v1/2025.law-1.1

Authors: Christina Barz, Melanie Siegel, Daniel Hanss, Michael Wiegand

Institutions: Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, University of Vienna

Language: English

Topic: Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining

Subfield: Artificial Intelligence

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Funder: Hochschule Darmstadt

OpenAlex ID: W4412944302