Text-Based Fine-Grained Emotion Prediction

Abstract

Text-based emotion prediction is an important task in the field of affective computing. Most prior work has been restricted to predicting emotions corresponding to a few high-level emotion classes. This paper explores and experiments with various techniques for fine-grained (27 classes) emotion prediction ^† which appeared at ACII 2021. In particular, (1) we present a method to incorporate multiple annotations from different raters, (2) we analyze the model's performance on fused emotion classes and with sub-sampled training data, (3) we present a method to leverage the correlations among the emotion categories, and (4) we propose a new framework for text-based fine-grained emotion prediction through emotion definition modeling. The emotion definition-based model outperforms the existing state-of-the-art for fine-grained emotion dataset GoEmotions. The approach involves a multi-task learning framework that models definitions of emotions as an auxiliary task while being trained on the primary task of emotion prediction. We model definitions using masked language modeling and class definition prediction tasks. We show that this trained model can be used for transfer learning on other benchmark datasets in emotion prediction with varying emotion label sets, domains, and sizes. The proposed models outperform the baselines on transfer learning experiments demonstrating the model's generalization capability.