Finding Good Representations of Emotions for Text Classification

Abstract: It is important for machines to interpret human emotions properly for better human-machine communications, as emotion is an essential part of human-to-human communications. One aspect of emotion is reflected in the language we use. How to represent emotions in texts is a challenge in natural language processing (NLP). Although continuous vector representations like word2vec have become the new norm for NLP problems, their limitations are that they do not take emotions into consideration and can unintentionally contain bias toward certain identities like different genders. This thesis focuses on improving existing representations in both word and sentence levels by explicitly taking emotions inside text and model bias into account in their training process. Our improved representations can help to build more robust machine learning models for affect-related text classification like sentiment/emotion analysis and abusive language detection. We first propose representations called emotional word vectors (EVEC), which is learned from a convolutional neural network model with an emotion-labeled corpus, which is constructed using hashtags. Secondly, we extend to learning sentence-level representations with a huge corpus of texts with the pseudo task of recognizing emojis. Our results show that, with the representations trained from millions of tweets with weakly supervised labels such as hashtags and emojis, we can solve sentiment/emotion analysis tasks more effectively. Lastly, as examples of model bias in representations of existing approaches, we explore a specific problem of automatic detection of abusive language. We address the issue of gender bias in various neural network models by conducting experiments to measure and reduce those biases in the representations in order to build more robust classification models.