Borrow from rich cousin: transfer learning for emotion detection using cross lingual embedding

Abstract Performance of any natural language processing (NLP) system greatly depends on the amount of resources and tools available in a particular language or domain. Therefore, while solving any problem in low-resource setting, it is important to investigate techniques to leverage the resources and tools available in resource-rich languages. In this paper we propose an efficient technique to mitigate the problem of resource scarcity for emotion detection in Hindi by leveraging information from a resource-rich language like English. Our method follows a deep transfer learning framework which efficiently captures relevant information through the shared space of two languages, showing significantly better performance compared to the monolingual scenario that learns in the vector space of only one language. As base learning models, we use Convolution Neural Network (CNN) and Bi-Directional Long Short Term Memory (Bi-LSTM). As there are no available emotion labeled dataset for Hindi, we create a new dataset for emotion detection in disaster domain by annotating sentences of news documents with nine different classes based on Plutchikâ;;s wheel of emotions. To improve the performance of emotion classification in Hindi, we employ transfer learning to exploit the resources available in the related domains. The core of our approach lies in generating a cross-lingual word embedding representation of words in the shared embedding space. The neural networks are trained on the existing datasets, and then weights are fine-tuned following the four different transfer learning strategies for emotion classification in Hindi. We obtain a significant performance gain in our our proposed transfer learning techniques, achieving an F1-score of 0.53 (compared to 0.47)-thereby implying that knowledge from a resource-rich language can be transferred across language and domains. 1