Topic-Enhanced Capsule Network for Multi-Label Emotion Classification

Abstract

Identifying multiple emotions in a piece of text is an important research topic in the NLP community.Existing methods usually model the task as a multi-label classification problem, while these work has two issues. First, these methods fail to leverage the topic information of the text, which has been shown to be effective for sentiment analysis task. Second, different parts of the text can contribute differently to predicting different emotion labels, so the proposed model needs to capture effective features for each corresponding emotion, which is not considered by existing models. To tackle these problems, we propose a topic-enhanced capsule network, which contains two main parts: a variational autoencoder and a capsule module, for multi-label emotion detection task. Specifically, the variational autoencoder can learn the latent topic information of the text, and the capsule module can capture rich features for corresponding emotion. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed model achieves the current best performance, outperforming previous methods and strong baselines by a large margin.