Improving Human Needs Categorization of Events with Semantic Classification

Abstract

Human Needs categories have been used to characterize the reason why an affective event is positive or negative. For example, ``I got the flu'' and ``I got fired'' are both negative (undesirable) events, but getting the flu is a Health problem while getting fired is a Financial problem. Previous work created learning models to assign events to Human Needs categories based on their words and contexts. In this paper, we introduce an intermediate step that assigns words to relevant semantic concepts. We create lightly supervised models that learn to label words with respect to 10 semantic concepts associated with Human Needs categories, and incorporate these labels as features for event categorization. Our results show that recognizing relevant semantic concepts improves both the recall and precision of Human Needs categorization for events.

Tasks

Reproductions