eMLM: A New Pre-training Objective for Emotion Related Tasks

BERT has been shown to be extremely effective on a wide variety of natural language processing tasks, including sentiment analysis and emotion detection. However, the proposed pretraining objectives of BERT do not induce any sentiment or emotion-specific biases into the model. In this paper, we present Emotion Masked Language Modelling, a variation of Masked Language Modelling aimed at improving the BERT language representation model for emotion detection and sentiment analysis tasks. Using the same pre-training corpora as the original model, Wikipedia and BookCorpus, our BERT variation manages to improve the downstream performance on 4 tasks from emotion detection and sentiment analysis by an average of 1.2{\%} F-1. Moreover, our approach shows an increased performance in our task-specific robustness tests.