Abstract:Fine-grained emotion classification, which identifies specific emotional states such as happiness, anger, sadness, and fear, remains a challenging task in natural language processing. This study benchmarks classical machine learning and deep learning approaches for 20-class emotion classification using the 20-Emotion Text Classification Dataset containing 79,595 English sentences. On the machine learning side, Logistic Regression, Multinomial Naive Bayes, and Support Vector Machine are evaluated using TF-IDF features. On the deep learning side, Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory, Gated Recurrent Unit, and a lightweight Transformer implemented in PyTorch are compared. The results show that BiLSTM achieves the best overall performance with 89% accuracy and a weighted F1-score of 0.89, slightly outperforming the best machine learning model, SVM, which reaches 88.11% accuracy. The findings indicate that while traditional machine learning models remain competitive and computationally efficient, sequence-based deep learning models better capture contextual emotional cues in text.
| Comments: | 7 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables. This paper compares machine learning and deep learning methods for 20-class emotion classification on an English text dataset of 79,595 samples |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2604.26310 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2604.26310v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.26310 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) |
Submission history
From: Martin Clinton Tosima Manullang [view email]
[v1]
Wed, 29 Apr 2026 05:31:45 UTC (287 KB)