Contextual Urdu Text Emotion Detection Corpus and Experiments using Deep Learning Approaches

Textual emotion detection aims to discover human emotions from written text. Textual emotion detection is a significant challenge due to the unavailability of facial and voice expressions. Considerable research has been done to identify textual emotions in high-resource languages such as English, French, Chinese, and others. Despite having over 300 million speakers and large volumes of literature available online, Urdu has not been properly investigated for the textual emotion detection task. To address this gap, this study makes two contributions: (1) the creation of a novel dialog-based corpus for Urdu (Contextual Urdu Text Emotion Detection Corpus). CUTEC contains 30,160 training and 5,509 testing labelled dialogues, where each dialogue consists of three Urdu contextual sentences. In addition, all dialogues are labelled using four emotion classes, i.e., Happy, Sad, Angry, and Other. As a second contribution (2) five deep learning models, i.e., RNN, LSTM, Bi-LSTM, GRU, and Bi-GRU have been trained and tested using CUTEC with different parametric settings. The highest results (Accuracy = 87.28 and F1 = 0.87) are attained using a GRU-based architecture.