Emotional Valence and Arousal over Time from Ecological Essays
SemEval-2026 Task 2: predicting self-reported emotional valence and arousal from ecological, first-person diary essays written over time. Unlike third-party sentiment labels, the ratings reflect the author's own subjectively experienced affect. Annotators read a diary-style essay and rate its valence and arousal; the shared task also forecasts how affect changes across successive entries.
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potato start config.yamlConfiguration File
This Potato config reproduces the annotation task. Save it as config.yaml and run potato start config.yaml to try it.
# Emotional Valence and Arousal over Time from Ecological Essays
# Based on Soni et al., SemEval-2026 Task 2
# Paper: https://aclanthology.org/2026.semeval-1.451/
# Task page: https://semeval2026task2.github.io/SemEval-2026-Task2/
#
# Ecological essays are first-person diary entries written over time, each
# paired with the author's OWN valence/arousal self-report (subjectively
# experienced affect, not third-party sentiment). The shared task has:
# - Subtask 1: assess affect (valence & arousal) for each essay
# - Subtask 2A/2B: forecast future affect across successive entries
# This showcase models Subtask 1: read the essay, rate its valence and
# arousal.
#
# Valence: how pleasant/positive the writer feels (1 = very unpleasant,
# 5 = neutral, 9 = very pleasant).
# Arousal: how activated/energized the writer feels (1 = very calm/low
# energy, 9 = very activated/high energy).
annotation_task_name: "Ecological Essay Valence & Arousal"
task_dir: "."
data_files:
- sample-data.json
item_properties:
id_key: "id"
text_key: "text"
output_annotation_dir: "annotation_output/"
export_annotation_format: "jsonl"
port: 8000
annotation_schemes:
- annotation_type: slider
name: valence
description: "Valence: how pleasant/positive does the writer feel? (1 = very unpleasant, 9 = very pleasant)"
min_value: 1
max_value: 9
starting_value: 5
- annotation_type: slider
name: arousal
description: "Arousal: how activated/energized does the writer feel? (1 = very calm, 9 = very activated)"
min_value: 1
max_value: 9
starting_value: 5
- annotation_type: text
name: notes
description: "Optional notes on cues that informed your rating"
multiline: true
required: false
annotation_instructions: |
Read the diary-style essay written in the first person. Rate the emotion
the writer is expressing on two continuous dimensions: valence (how
pleasant vs. unpleasant they feel) and arousal (how activated vs. calm
they feel). Judge the writer's own experienced affect, not your reaction
to the topic.
user_config:
allow_all_users: true
max_annotations_per_user: 50
num_annotators_per_item: 3
Sample Data
[
{
"id": "eva_001",
"text": "Today was exhausting. Back-to-back shifts, barely a break, and my feet are killing me. I just want to sleep for a week."
},
{
"id": "eva_002",
"text": "Got the promotion I've been working toward for two years! I called my mom right away and we both cried. Best day in a long time."
}
]
// ... and 8 more itemsTry it live — no install
Boot the real Potato server in your browser (WebAssembly) and annotate with this exact config. Nothing leaves your machine.
Run live in your browserGet This Design
Clone or download from the repository
Quick start:
git clone https://github.com/davidjurgens/potato-showcase.git
cd potato-showcase/semeval/2026/task02-emotion-valence-arousal-dynamics
potato start config.yamlDataset & paper
Soni et al., SemEval 2026 (Task 2)
Citation (BibTeX)
@inproceedings{soni-etal-2026-semeval,
title = "{S}em{E}val-2026 Task 2: Predicting Variation in Emotional Valence and Arousal over Time from Ecological Essays",
author = "Soni, Nikita and Schwartz, H. Andrew and Boyd, Ryan L. and Bui, Phi Long and Mahwish, Syeda and Nilsson, August H{\aa}kan and Ganesan, Adithya V and Ungar, Lyle and Balasubramanian, Niranjan and Mohammad, Saif M.",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2026)",
year = "2026",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.semeval-1.451",
pages = "3731--3752"
}Details
Annotation Types
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