Decision support with text-based emotion recognition: Deep learning for affective computing
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Emotions widely affect the decision-making of humans and, hence, affective computing takes emotional states into account with the goal of tailoring decision support to individuals. However, the accurate recognition of emotions within narrative materials presents a challenging undertaking due to the complexity and ambiguity of language. Even though deep learning has evolved as the state-of-the-art in various tasks from text mining, its benefits with regard to affective computing are not yet understood. We thus propose the following innovations: (1) we adapt recurrent neural networks from the field of deep learning to affective computing. (2) We extend these networks for predicting the score of different affective dimensions. (3) We implement transfer learning for pre-training word embeddings. Analyzing the results, we find that deep learning consistently outperforms traditional machine learning with improvements of up to 21 forecast errors when rating the intensity of emotions. Altogether, the findings have considerable implications for the use of affective computing in providing decision support.
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