Explainable Emotion Recognition in Social Networks with Transformers

Emotion recognition in text has become an essential research area within artificial intelligence and natural language processing due to its applications in sentiment analysis, human-computer interaction, and social media analysis. This paper introduces an approach for emotion recognition in social networks using transformer models enhanced with explainability techniques. By leveraging the advanced capabilities of transformers to analyze and classify emotions in written content, our finetuned models achieves high accuracy in identifying emotions according to the Ekman emotional model. The integration of LIME and SHAP provides transparency and interpretability to our model, making it more trustworthy for practical applications. Our findings indicate that models like XLNET report an exceptional performance in emotion recognition tasks. The explainability techniques illustrate the transformer model decision-making processes and the way that they utilize words and their continual information in sentences.