Improving Text Emotion Detection Through Comprehensive Dataset Quality Analysis

As Artificial Intelligence assistants like OpenAI’s Chat-GPT or Google’s Gemini become increasingly integrated into our daily lives, their ability to understand and respond to human emotions expressed in natural language becomes essential. Affective computing, including text emotion detection (TED), has become crucial for human-computer interaction. However, the quality of datasets used for training supervised machine learning algorithms in TED often receives insufficient attention, potentially impacting model performance and comparability. This study addresses this gap by proposing a comprehensive framework for assessing dataset quality in TED. We introduce 14 quantitative metrics across four dimensions: representativity, readability, structure, and part-of-speech tag distribution, and investigate their impact on model performance. We conduct experiments on datasets with varying quality characteristics Using Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) models. Our findings demonstrate that changes in these quality metrics can lead to statistically significant variations in model performance, with most metrics showing over 5% impact on prediction accuracy. Notably, pre-trained models like BERT exhibit more robustness to dataset quality variations than models trained from scratch. These results underscore the importance of considering and reporting dataset quality metrics in TED research, as they significantly influence model performance and generalizability. Our study lays the groundwork for more rigorous dataset quality assessment in affective computing, potentially leading to more reliable and comparable TED models in the future.