Machine learning techniques for emotion detection and sentiment analysis: current state, challenges, and future directions

ABSTRACT

Emotion detection and Sentiment analysis techniques are used to understand polarity or emotions expressed by people in many cases, especially during interactive systems use. Recognizing users’ emotions is an important topic for human–computer interaction. Computers that recognize emotions would provide more natural interactions. Also, emotion detection helps design human-centred systems that provide adaptable behaviour change interventions based on users’ emotions. The growing capability of machine learning to analyze big data and extract emotions therein has led to a surge in research in this domain. With this increased attention, it becomes essential to investigate this research area and provide a comprehensive review of the current state. In this paper, we conduct a systematic review of 123 papers on machine learning-based emotion detection to investigate research trends along many themes, including machine learning approaches, application domain, data, evaluation, and outcome. The results demonstrate: 1) increasing interest in this domain, 2) supervised machine learning (namely, SVM and Naïve Bayes) are the most popular algorithms, 3) Text datasets in the English language are the most common data source, and 4) most research use Accuracy to evaluate performance. Based on the findings, we suggest future directions and recommendations for developing human-centred systems.

ADDITIONAL KEYWORDS AND PHRASES:

• Emotion detection
• emotion recognition
• sentiment analysis
• opinion mining
• machine learning
• deep learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada Research Chairs Program. We acknowledge the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) through the Discovery Grant. The research is conducted as part of the Dalhousie Persuasive Computing Lab.