Identification of emotions on Twitter during the 2022 electoral process in Colombia

TL;DR

This paper presents a new dataset of Spanish tweets related to the 2022 Colombian elections, labeled with emotions, and evaluates emotion classification models including BERT and GPT-3.5, addressing a gap in resources for Colombian Spanish.

Contribution

The study introduces a novel emotion-labeled tweet corpus in Colombian Spanish and compares state-of-the-art models for emotion detection in this context.

Findings

BERT models outperform GPT-3.5 in emotion classification.

The dataset and code are publicly available for further research.

Emotion detection provides insights into public perception during elections.

Abstract

The study of Twitter as a means for analyzing social phenomena has gained interest in recent years due to the availability of large amounts of data in a relatively spontaneous environment. Within opinion-mining tasks, emotion detection is specially relevant, as it allows for the identification of people's subjective responses to different social events in a more granular way than traditional sentiment analysis based on polarity. In the particular case of political events, the analysis of emotions in social networks can provide valuable information on the perception of candidates, proposals, and other important aspects of the public debate. In spite of this importance, there are few studies on emotion detection in Spanish and, to the best of our knowledge, few resources are public for opinion mining in Colombian Spanish, highlighting the need for generating resources addressing the specific cultural characteristics of this variety. In this work, we present a small corpus of tweets in Spanish related to the 2022 Colombian presidential elections, manually labeled with emotions using a fine-grained taxonomy. We perform classification experiments using supervised state-of-the-art models (BERT models) and compare them with GPT-3.5 in few-shot learning settings. We make our dataset and code publicly available for research purposes.