Contextual emotion detection using ensemble deep learning

Abstract

Emotion detection from online textual information is gaining more attention due to its usefulness in understanding users’ behaviors and their desires. This is driven by the large amounts of texts from different sources such as social media and shopping websites. Recent studies investigated the benefits of deep learning in the detection of emotions from textual conversations. In this paper, we study the performance of several deep learning and transformer-based models in the classification of emotions in English conversations. Further, we apply ensemble learning using a majority voting technique to improve the overall classification performance. We evaluated our proposed models on the SemEval 2019 Task 3 public dataset that categorizes emotions as Happy, Angry, Sad, and Others. The results show that our models can successfully distinguish the three main classes of emotions and separate them from Others in a highly imbalanced dataset. The transformer-based models achieved a micro-averaged F1-score of up to 75.55%, whereas the RNN-based models only reached 67.03%. Further, we show that the ensemble model significantly improves the overall performance and achieves a micro-averaged F1-score of 77.07%.