BRIGHTER: BRIdging the Gap in Human-Annotated Textual Emotion Recognition Datasets for 28 Languages

People worldwide use language in subtle and complex ways to express emotions. While emotion recognition -- an umbrella term for several NLP tasks -- significantly impacts different applications in NLP and other fields, most work in the area is focused on high-resource languages. Therefore, this has led to major disparities in research and proposed solutions, especially for low-resource languages that suffer from the lack of high-quality datasets. In this paper, we present BRIGHTER -- a collection of multilabeled emotion-annotated datasets in 28 different languages. BRIGHTER covers predominantly low-resource languages from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, with instances from various domains annotated by fluent speakers. We describe the data collection and annotation processes and the challenges of building these datasets. Then, we report different experimental results for monolingual and crosslingual multi-label emotion identification, as well as intensity-level emotion recognition. We investigate results with and without using LLMs and analyse the large variability in performance across languages and text domains. We show that BRIGHTER datasets are a step towards bridging the gap in text-based emotion recognition and discuss their impact and utility.

@article{muhammad2025_2502.11926,
  title={ BRIGHTER: BRIdging the Gap in Human-Annotated Textual Emotion Recognition Datasets for 28 Languages },
  author={ Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad and Nedjma Ousidhoum and Idris Abdulmumin and Jan Philip Wahle and Terry Ruas and Meriem Beloucif and Christine de Kock and Nirmal Surange and Daniela Teodorescu and Ibrahim Said Ahmad and David Ifeoluwa Adelani and Alham Fikri Aji and Felermino D. M. A. Ali and Ilseyar Alimova and Vladimir Araujo and Nikolay Babakov and Naomi Baes and Ana-Maria Bucur and Andiswa Bukula and Guanqun Cao and Rodrigo Tufino Cardenas and Rendi Chevi and Chiamaka Ijeoma Chukwuneke and Alexandra Ciobotaru and Daryna Dementieva and Murja Sani Gadanya and Robert Geislinger and Bela Gipp and Oumaima Hourrane and Oana Ignat and Falalu Ibrahim Lawan and Rooweither Mabuya and Rahmad Mahendra and Vukosi Marivate and Andrew Piper and Alexander Panchenko and Charles Henrique Porto Ferreira and Vitaly Protasov and Samuel Rutunda and Manish Shrivastava and Aura Cristina Udrea and Lilian Diana Awuor Wanzare and Sophie Wu and Florian Valentin Wunderlich and Hanif Muhammad Zhafran and Tianhui Zhang and Yi Zhou and Saif M. Mohammad },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.11926},
  year={ 2025 }
}