Xulang Zhang

Xulang Zhang is currently a research fellow at College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University, where she carries out research on affective computing, explainable Al, and natural language processing. She obtained her PhD in Computing and Data Science from NTU in 2024 under the co-supervision of Prof Erik Cambria and Dr Rui Mao, with the focus on neurosymbolic sentiment analysis through task decomposition at syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels. 

Multilingual Emotion Recognition: Discovering the Variations of Lexical Semantics between Languages

The task of multilingual emotion recognition holds significant importance in cross-cultural communication and data mining. While prior research has concentrated on enhancing classification accuracy using state-of-the-art techniques, it has often overlooked a crucial linguistic aspect—the semantic disparities across different languages. This study aims to address this gap by introducing a novel method to identify lexical semantic variations in diverse languages. The detected semantic variation features are subsequently injected into a multilingual emotion recognition model to enhance its performance within a target language. Notably, existing multilingual pre-trained language models are likely biased toward English word meanings, leading to inaccurate emotion predictions in other languages due to the misinterpretation of semantics. Our proposed semantic variation injection method tackles this limitation, resulting in improved accuracy. These findings contribute to the ongoing development of robust and culturally sensitive emotion recognition systems, offering valuable insights for both the linguistics and computational linguistics communities engaged in multilingual research.