Context-aware Emotion Detection from Low-resource Urdu Language Using Deep Neural Network

Emotion detection (ED) plays a vital role in determining individual interest in any field. Humans use gestures, facial expressions, and voice pitch and choose words to describe their emotions. Significant work has been done to detect emotions from the textual data in English, French, Chinese, and other high-resource languages. However, emotion classification has not been well studied in low-resource languages (i.e., Urdu) due to the lack of labeled corpora. This article presents a publicly available Urdu Nastalique Emotions Dataset (UNED) of sentences and paragraphs annotated with different emotions and proposes a deep learning (DL)-based technique for classifying emotions in the UNED corpus. Our annotated UNED corpus has six emotions for both paragraphs and sentences. We perform extensive experimentation to evaluate the quality of the corpus and further classify it using machine learning and DL approaches. Experimental results show that the developed DL-based model performs better than generic machine learning approaches with an F1 score of 85% on the UNED sentence-based corpus and 50% on the UNED paragraph-based corpus.