TeamUNCC at SemEval-2018 Task 1: Emotion Detection in English and Arabic Tweets using Deep Learning

Task 1 in the International Workshop SemEval 2018, Affect in Tweets, introduces five subtasks (El-reg, El-oc, V-reg, V-oc, and E-c) to detect the intensity of emotions in English, Arabic, and Spanish tweets. This paper describes TeamUNCC{'}s system to detect emotions in English and Arabic tweets. Our approach is novel in that we present the same architecture for all the five subtasks in both English and Arabic. The main input to the system is a combination of word2vec and doc2vec embeddings and a set of psycholinguistic features (e.g. from AffectTweets Weka-package). We apply a fully connected neural network architecture and obtain performance results that show substantial improvements in Spearman correlation scores over the baseline models provided by Task 1 organizers, (ranging from 0.03 to 0.23). TeamUNCC{'}s system ranks third in subtask El-oc and fourth in other subtasks for Arabic tweets.