Warmth and Competence (Sentence-Level Social Perception)
Sentence-level annotation of social perception along the two fundamental dimensions of social cognition: warmth and competence. Following the W&C-Sent dataset (Ayesh, Mohammad, and Ousidhoum, ACL 2026), each item pairs a social-media sentence with a target entity (an individual or social group), and annotators rate how much the sentence expresses trust and sociability (the two components of warmth) and competence toward that target, each on a 7-point scale from -3 to +3. The dimensions are rated independently.
Configuration Fileconfig.yaml
This Potato config reproduces the annotation task. Save it as config.yaml and run potato start config.yaml to try it.
# Warmth and Competence — Sentence-Level Social Perception
# Based on the W&C-Sent dataset:
# Ayesh, Mohammad, and Ousidhoum (2026), "Annotating Dimensions of Social
# Perception in Text: A Sentence-Level Dataset of Warmth and Competence."
# ACL 2026 (Volume 1: Long Papers), pp. 6374-6412.
# Paper: https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.289/
# Data: https://github.com/nedjmaou/W_C_Sent
#
# Warmth and competence are the two fundamental dimensions along which people
# evaluate individuals and social groups. Each item pairs a sentence with a
# target entity; annotators rate the sentence, with respect to that target, on
# three independent 7-point (-3 to +3) dimensions:
# - Trust (a component of warmth)
# - Sociability (a component of warmth)
# - Competence
# In the original study each sentence-target pair was rated by 4-7 annotators,
# with each dimension presented independently to reduce cognitive load.
annotation_task_name: "Warmth and Competence - Social Perception"
task_dir: "."
data_files:
- sample-data.json
item_properties:
id_key: "id"
text_key: "text"
output_annotation_dir: "annotation_output/"
output_annotation_format: "json"
port: 8000
server_name: localhost
annotation_schemes:
- annotation_type: likert
name: trust
description: "TRUST (a component of warmth): how much does the sentence express trust vs. distrust toward the target?"
min_value: -3
max_value: 3
labels:
-3: "-3 high distrust"
-2: "-2 moderate distrust"
-1: "-1 slight distrust"
0: "0 neutral / not applicable / not expressed"
1: "+1 slight trust"
2: "+2 moderate trust"
3: "+3 high trust"
- annotation_type: likert
name: sociability
description: "SOCIABILITY (a component of warmth): how much does the sentence express sociability vs. unsociability toward the target?"
min_value: -3
max_value: 3
labels:
-3: "-3 high unsociability"
-2: "-2 moderate unsociability"
-1: "-1 slight unsociability"
0: "0 neutral / not applicable / not expressed"
1: "+1 slight sociability"
2: "+2 moderate sociability"
3: "+3 high sociability"
- annotation_type: likert
name: competence
description: "COMPETENCE: how much does the sentence express competence vs. incompetence toward the target?"
min_value: -3
max_value: 3
labels:
-3: "-3 high incompetence"
-2: "-2 moderate incompetence"
-1: "-1 slight incompetence"
0: "0 neutral / not applicable / not expressed"
1: "+1 slight competence"
2: "+2 moderate competence"
3: "+3 high competence"
annotation_instructions: |
You are shown a social-media post together with a TARGET entity (an individual
or a social group). Read the post and judge what it expresses about the target
along three dimensions, each on a scale from -3 to +3:
- Trust: does it portray the target as trustworthy or untrustworthy?
- Sociability: does it portray the target as warm/friendly or cold/hostile?
- Competence: does it portray the target as capable or incapable?
Rate each dimension independently. Use 0 when the dimension is neutral, not
applicable, or not expressed. Judge only what the sentence conveys about the
named target, not your own opinion of that target.
html_layout: |
<div style="padding: 15px; max-width: 800px; margin: auto;">
<div style="background: #eff6ff; border: 1px solid #bfdbfe; border-radius: 8px; padding: 8px 12px; margin-bottom: 10px;">
<strong style="color: #1e40af;">Target:</strong> <span>{{target}}</span>
</div>
<div style="background: #f8fafc; border: 1px solid #e2e8f0; border-radius: 8px; padding: 16px;">
<strong style="color: #334155;">Post:</strong>
<p style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.7; margin: 8px 0 0 0;">{{text}}</p>
</div>
</div>
allow_all_users: true
instances_per_annotator: 50
annotation_per_instance: 5
allow_skip: true
Sample Datasample-data.json
[
{
"id": "wc_001",
"target": "the new team lead",
"text": "Honestly the new team lead has bailed us out of three impossible deadlines already, the person just knows what they're doing."
},
{
"id": "wc_002",
"target": "my landlord",
"text": "My landlord never answers messages and only shows up when the rent is a day late."
}
]
// ... and 8 more itemsGet This Design
Clone or download from the repository
Quick start:
git clone https://github.com/davidjurgens/potato-showcase.git cd potato-showcase/text/emotion-sentiment/warmth-competence-sentences potato start config.yaml
Dataset & paper
Mutaz Ayesh, Saif M. Mohammad, and Nedjma Ousidhoum. 2026. Annotating Dimensions of Social Perception in Text: A Sentence-Level Dataset of Warmth and Competence. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers).
Citation (BibTeX)
@inproceedings{ayesh-etal-2026-annotating,
title = "Annotating Dimensions of Social Perception in Text: A Sentence-Level Dataset of Warmth and Competence",
author = "Ayesh, Mutaz and Mohammad, Saif M. and Ousidhoum, Nedjma",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
year = "2026",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.289",
pages = "6374--6412"
}Details
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