Negative emotion detection on social media during the peak time of COVID-19 through deep learning with an auto-regressive transformer

Abstract

Negative emotion detection is challenging during the peak time of the COVID-19 period. Most earlier studies contain individuals’ physical health recognition rather than mental health detection, which is a significant concern in facing the COVID-19 situation. Identifying mental health in advance is essential to understand individuals’ psychological condition. This paper considers the texts from social media during the pandemic of COVID-19. We propose a novel context-based auto-regressive transformer with bidirectional long short-term memory and a convolutional neural network (Context-ABT-BiLSTM-CNN) model to detect emotions such as abuse, anger, anxiety, depression, disgust, fear, guilt, sadness, and shame on social media. The existing works do not suggest relevant terms to detect suitable context; as a result, there is no scope for detecting emotions. We introduce a novel topic-based text (TBT) with a rule-based permutation (RBP) procedure to extract the relevant text from social media to identify emotions. Random search is suggested to store each input’s correlated information and the order of each sequence. We recommend various transformer components to maintain the text sequence, avoid discrepancies during model training, capture the long-distance semantics in bidirectional contexts, and adopt both the permutation and factorization processes to build the model. Moreover, a comparative study is introduced to detect the most dominant emotions on social media during the pandemic and non-pandemic periods. The proposed model with XLNet embeddings surpasses state-of-the-art models for detecting text emotions. The ablation study is conducted to understand the essential components needed for the proposed model.