SSN NLP at SemEval-2019 task 3: Contextual emotion identification from textual conversation using Seq2Seq deep neural network

Abstract

Emotion identification is a process of identifying the emotions automatically from text, speech or images. Emotion identification from textual conversations is a challenging problem due to absence of gestures, vocal intonation and facial expressions. It enables conversational agents, chat bots and messengers to detect and report the emotions to the user instantly for a healthy conversation by avoiding emotional cues and miscommunications. We have adopted a Seq2Seq deep neural network to identify the emotions present in the text sequences. Several layers namely embedding layer, encoding-decoding layer, softmax layer and a loss layer are used to map the sequences from textual conversations to the emotions namely Angry, Happy, Sad and Others. We have evaluated our approach on the EmoContext@SemEval2019 dataset and we have obtained the micro-averaged F1 scores as 0.595 and 0.6568 for the pre-evaluation dataset and final evaluation test set respectively. Our approach improved the base line score by 7% for final evaluation test set.