SAEP: A Surrounding-Aware Individual Emotion Prediction Model Combined with T-LSTM and Memory Attention Mechanism

Abstract

The future emotion prediction of users on social media has been attracting increasing attention from academics. Previous studies on predicting future emotion have focused on the characteristics of individuals’ emotion changes; however, the role of the individual’s neighbors has not yet been thoroughly researched. To fill this gap, a surrounding-aware individual emotion prediction model (SAEP) based on a deep encoder–decoder architecture is proposed to predict individuals’ future emotions. In particular, two memory-based attention networks are constructed: The time-evolving attention network and the surrounding attention network to extract the features of the emotional changes of users and neighbors, respectively. Then, these features are incorporated into the emotion prediction task. In addition, a novel variant LSTM is introduced as the encoder of the proposed model, which can effectively extract complex patterns of users’ emotional changes from irregular time series. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms five alternative methods. The SAEP approach has improved by approximately 4.21–14.84% micro F1 on a dataset built from Twitter and 7.30–13.41% on a dataset built from Microblog. Further analyses validate the effectiveness of the proposed time-evolving context and surrounding context, as well as the factors that may affect the prediction results.