Emotion Enriched Retrofitted Word Embeddings

Word embeddings learned using the distributional hypothesis (e.g., GloVe, Word2vec) are good at encoding various lexical-semantic relations. However, they do not capture the emotion aspects of words. We present a novel retrofitting method for updating the vectors of emotion bearing words like fun, offence, angry, etc. The retrofitted embeddings achieve better inter-cluster and intra-cluster distance for words having the same emotions, e.g., the joy cluster containing words like fun, happiness, etc., and the anger cluster with words like offence, rage, etc., as evaluated through different cluster quality metrics. For the downstream tasks on sentiment analysis and sarcasm detection, simple classification models, such as SVM and Attention Net, learned using our retrofitted embeddings perform better than their pre-trained counterparts (about 1.5 % improvement in F1-score) as well as other benchmarks. Furthermore, the difference in performance is more pronounced in the limited data setting.