Annotation of Complex Emotions in Real-Life Dialogues: The Case of Empathy

In this paper we discuss the problem of an-notating emotions in real-life spoken conversations by investigating the special case of empathy. We pro-pose an annotation model based on the situated theories of emotions. The annotation scheme is directed to ob-serve the natural unfolding of empathy during the conversations. The key component of the protocol is the identification of the annotation unit based both on linguistic and paralinguistic cues. In the last part of the paper we evaluate the reliability of the annotation model.