CECL at SemEval-2019 Task 3: Using Surface Learning for Detecting Emotion in Textual Conversations

This paper describes the system developed by the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics for the SemEval-2019 Task 3: EmoContext. It aimed at classifying the emotion of a user utterance in a textual conversation as happy, sad, angry or other. It is based on a large number of feature types, mainly unigrams and bigrams, which were extracted by a SAS program. The usefulness of the different feature types was evaluated by means of Monte-Carlo resampling tests. As this system does not rest on any deep learning component, which is currently considered as the state-of-the-art approach, it can be seen as a possible point of comparison for such kind of systems.