Affect detection from arabic tweets using ensemble and deep learning techniques

Abstract

Affect detection from text has captured the attention of researchers recently. This is due to the rapid use of social media sites (e.g. Twitter, Facebook), which allows users to express their feelings, emotions, and thoughts in textual format. Analyzing emotion-rich textual data of social networks has many real-life applications. The context of an emotional text can be measured by analyzing certain features of this rich source of emotional information. Classifying text into emotional labels/intensities is considered a difficult problem. This paper resolves one of the state-of-the-art NLP research emotion and intensity detection tasks using Deep Learning and ensemble implementations. In this paper, we developed several innovative approaches; (a) bidirectional GRU_CNN (BiGRU_CNN), (b) conventional neural networks (CNN), and (c) XGBoost regressor (XGB). The ensemble of BiGRU_CNN, CNN, and XGB is used to solve an emotion intensity (EI-reg) task of the SemEval-2018 Task1 (Affect in Tweets). Our proposed ensemble approach was evaluated using a reference dataset of the SemEval-2018 Task1. Results show that our approach is well above the baseline for this task. It also achieved a Pearson of (69.2%), with an enhancement of 0.7% in comparison with previous best performing models.