Language Models Can Generate Human-Like Self-Reports of Emotion

Computational interaction and user modeling is presently limited in the domain of emotions. We investigate a potential new approach to computational modeling of emotional response behavior, by using modern neural language models to generate synthetic self-report data, and evaluating the human-likeness of the results. More specifically, we generate responses to the PANAS questionnaire with four different variants of the recent GPT-3 model. Based on both data visualizations and multiple quantitative metrics, the human-likeness of the responses increases with model size, with the largest Davinci model variant generating the most human-like data.