Transformer-based Text Classification on Unified Bangla Multi-class Emotion Corpus

Due to its importance in studying people’s thoughts on various Web 2.0 services, emotion classification is a critical undertaking. Most existing research is focused on the English language, with little work on low-resource languages. Though sentiment analysis, particularly emotion classification in English, has received increasing attention in recent years, little study has been done in the context of Bangla, one of the world’s most widely spoken languages. In this research, we propose a complete set of approaches for identifying and extracting emotions from Bangla texts. We provide a Bangla emotion classifier for six classes, i.e., anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise, from Bangla words using transformer-based models, which exhibit phenomenal results in recent days, especially for high-resource languages. The Unified Bangla Multi-class Emotion Corpus (UBMEC) is used to assess the performance of our models. UBMEC is created by combining two previously released manually labelled datasets of Bangla comments on six emotion classes with fresh manually labelled Bangla comments created by us. The corpus dataset and code we used in this work are publicly available.