Leveraging Writing Systems Change for Deep Learning Based Chinese Emotion Analysis

Abstract

Social media text written in Chinese communities contains mixed scripts including major text written in Chinese, an ideograph-based writing system, and some minor text using Latin letters, an alphabet-based writing system. This phenomenon is called writing systems changes (WSCs). Past studies have shown that WSCs can be used to express emotions, particularly where the social and political environment is more conservative. However, because WSCs can break the syntax of the major text, it poses more challenges in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks like emotion classification. In this work, we present a novel deep learning based method to include WSCs as an effective feature for emotion analysis. The method first identifies all WSCs points. Then representation of the major text is learned through an LSTM model whereas the minor text is learned by a separate CNN model. Emotions in the minor text are further highlighted through an attention mechanism before emotion classification. Performance evaluation shows that incorporating WSCs features using deep learning models can improve performance measured by F1-scores compared to the state-of-the-art model.