Understanding Emotions in Text Using Deep Learning and Big Data

Big Data and Deep Learning algorithms combined with enormous computing power have paved ways for significant technological advancements. Technology is evolving to anticipate, understand and address our unmet needs. However, to fully meet human needs, machines or computers must deeply understand human behavior including emotions. Emotions are physiological states generated in humans as a reaction to internal or external events. They are complex and studied across numerous fields including computer science. As humans, on reading Why don't you ever text me!, we can either interpret it as a sad or an angry emotion and the same ambiguity exists for machines as well. Lack of facial expressions and voice modulations make detecting emotions in text a challenging problem. However, in today's online world, humans are increasingly communicating using text messaging applications and digital agents. Hence, it is imperative for machines to understand emotions in textual dialogue to provide emotionally aware responses to users. In this paper, we propose a novel Deep Learning based approach to detect emotions- Happy, Sad and Angry in textual dialogues. The essence of our approach lies in combining both semantic and sentiment based representations for more accurate emotion detection. We use semi-automated techniques to gather large scale training data with diverse ways of expressing emotions to train our model. Evaluation of our approach on real world dialogue datasets reveals that it significantly outperforms traditional Machine Learning baselines as well as other off-the-shelf Deep Learning models.