HITSZ-HLT at WASSA-2024 Shared Task 2: Language-agnostic Multi-task Learning for Explainability of Cross-lingual Emotion Detection

This paper describes the system developed by the HITSZ-HLT team for WASSA-2024 Shared Task 2, which addresses two closely linked subtasks: Cross-lingual Emotion Detection and Binary Trigger Word Detection in tweets. The main goal of Shared Task 2 is to simultaneously identify the emotions expressed and detect the trigger words across multiple languages. To achieve this, we introduce a Language-agnostic Multi Task Learning (LaMTL) framework that integrates emotion prediction and emotion trigger word detection tasks. By fostering synergistic interactions between task-specific and task-agnostic representations, the LaMTL aims to mutually enhance emotional cues, ultimately improving the performance of both tasks. Additionally, we leverage large-scale language models to translate the training dataset into multiple languages, thereby fostering the formation of language-agnostic representations within the model, significantly enhancing the model’s ability to transfer and perform well across multilingual data. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework across both tasks, with a particular highlight on its success in achieving second place in sub-task 2.