Exploring Deep Neural Networks and Transfer Learning for Analyzing Emotions in Tweets

Abstract: In this paper, we present an experiment on using deep learning and transfer learning techniques for emotion analysis in tweets and suggest a method to interpret our deep learning models. The proposed approach for emotion analysis combines a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Then we extend this approach for emotion intensity prediction using transfer learning technique. Furthermore, we propose a technique to visualize the importance of each word in a tweet to get a better understanding of the model. Experimentally, we show in our analysis that the proposed models outperform the state-of-the-art in emotion classification while maintaining competitive results in predicting emotion intensity.