How Thousands of Citizen Readers Helped Build the Largest Open-Vocabulary Dataset of Narrative Emotions

CR4-NarrEmote is a project we released at EMNLP 2025. It’s the first large-scale, open-vocabulary dataset of emotions in narrative text—built not by professional annotators or microtask workers but by 3,738 volunteer readers from around the world. Over four months, they generated more than 200,000 emotion annotations across 43,000 passages of long-form fiction and nonfiction using our Citizen Readers platform. Most emotion…