Comparative Analysis Of Convolutional Neural Networks, Long Short-Term Memory Networks, and Bert For Text-Based Emotion Classification

Abstract

This paper presents a detailed experimental study and comparative analysis of three popular deep learning architectures (CNN, LSTM, and BERT) for emotion classification in written messages. Using a publicly available dataset of six unique emotional states (sadness, joy, love, anger, fear, and surprise), an effective ablation study was conducted to determine optimal architectural configurations, including a sequence length of 66 tokens and an embedding size of 200. To validate the results of a comparative analysis of model performance, a bootstrap technique (30 trials) and the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test were used to eliminate potential bias. As shown by experiments, the tuned BERT architecture (with a learning rate of 2e-5) produced the most accurate and reliable result of 93.50% in classifying emotional states from texts. Moreover, with an appropriate sequence length configuration, the LSTM network (89.92%) significantly outperformed the CNN (89.65%), confirming the need to account for long-range dependencies in emotion classification. Overall, the research results show the key importance of hyperparameter tuning and the ability to handle complex information for emotion identification.