Nearest neighbour approaches for Emotion Detection in Tweets

Olha Kaminska, Chris Cornelis, Veronique Hoste


Abstract
Emotion detection is an important task that can be applied to social media data to discover new knowledge. While the use of deep learning methods for this task has been prevalent, they are black-box models, making their decisions hard to interpret for a human operator. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an approach using weighted k Nearest Neighbours (kNN), a simple, easy to implement, and explainable machine learning model. These qualities can help to enhance results’ reliability and guide error analysis. In particular, we apply the weighted kNN model to the shared emotion detection task in tweets from SemEval-2018. Tweets are represented using different text embedding methods and emotion lexicon vocabulary scores, and classification is done by an ensemble of weighted kNN models. Our best approaches obtain results competitive with state-of-the-art solutions and open up a promising alternative path to neural network methods.
Anthology ID:
2021.wassa-1.22
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis
Month:
April
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Orphee De Clercq, Alexandra Balahur, Joao Sedoc, Valentin Barriere, Shabnam Tafreshi, Sven Buechel, Veronique Hoste
Venue:
WASSA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
203–212
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wassa-1.22
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Olha Kaminska, Chris Cornelis, and Veronique Hoste. 2021. Nearest neighbour approaches for Emotion Detection in Tweets. In Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis, pages 203–212, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Nearest neighbour approaches for Emotion Detection in Tweets (Kaminska et al., WASSA 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.wassa-1.22.pdf
Code
 olha-kaminska/wknn_emotion_detection