Context Modelling Using Hierarchical Attention Networks for Sentiment and Self-assessed Emotion Detection in Spoken Narratives

Automatic detection of sentiment and affect in personal narratives through word usage has the potential to assist in the automated detection of change in psychotherapy. Such a tool could, for instance, provide an efficient, objective measure of the time a person has been in a positive or negative state-of-mind. Towards this goal, we propose and develop a hierarchical attention model for the tasks of sentiment (positive and negative) and self-assessed affect detection in transcripts of personal narratives. We also perform a qualitative analysis of the word attentions learnt by our sentiment analysis model. In a key result, our attention model achieved an un-weighted average recall (UAR) of 91.0 % in a binary sentiment detection task on the test partition of the Ulm State-of-Mind in Speech (USoMS) corpus. We also achieved UARs of 73.7 % and 68.6 % in the 3-class tasks of arousal and valence detection respectively. Finally, our qualitative analysis associates colloquial reinforcements with positive sentiments, and uncertain phrasing with negative sentiments.