Are You Really Complaining? A Multi-task Framework for Complaint Identification, Emotion, and Sentiment Classification

Apoorva Singh, Sriparna Saha

Abstract: In recent times, given the competitive nature of corporates, customer support has become the core of organizations that can strengthen their brand image. Timely and effective settlement of customer’s complaints is vital in improving customer satisfaction in different business organizations. Companies experience difficulties in automatically identifying complaints buried deep in enormous online content. Emotion detection and sentiment analysis, two closely related tasks, play very critical roles in complaint identification. We hypothesize that the association between emotion and sentiment will provide an enhanced understanding of the state of mind of the tweeter. In this paper, we propose a Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) based shared-private multi-task framework that aims to learn three closely related tasks, viz. complaint identification (primary task), emotion detection, and sentiment classification (auxiliary tasks) concurrently. Experimental results show that our proposed model obtains the highest macro-F1 score of 87.38%, outperforming the multi-task baselines as well as the state-of-the-art model by indicative margins, denoting that emotion awareness and sentiment analysis facilitate the complaint identification task when learned simultaneously.