Technological advancements in web platforms allow people to express and share
emotions towards textual write-ups written and shared by others. This brings
about different interesting domains for analysis; emotion expressed by the
writer and emotion elicited from the readers. In this paper, we propose a novel
approach for Readers' Emotion Detection from short-text documents using a deep
learning model called REDAffectiveLM. Within state-of-the-art NLP tasks, it is
well understood that utilizing context-specific representations from
transformer-based pre-trained language models helps achieve improved
performance. Within this affective computing task, we explore how incorporating
affective information can further enhance performance. Towards this, we
leverage context-specific and affect enriched representations by using a
transformer-based pre-trained language model in tandem with affect enriched
Bi-LSTM+Attention. For empirical evaluation, we procure a new dataset REN-20k,
besides using RENh-4k and SemEval-2007. We evaluate the performance of our
REDAffectiveLM rigorously across these datasets, against a vast set of
state-of-the-art baselines, where our model consistently outperforms baselines
and obtains statistically significant results. Our results establish that
utilizing affect enriched representation along with context-specific
representation within a neural architecture can considerably enhance readers'
emotion detection. Since the impact of affect enrichment specifically in
readers' emotion detection isn't well explored, we conduct a detailed analysis
over affect enriched Bi-LSTM+Attention using qualitative and quantitative model
behavior evaluation techniques. We observe that compared to conventional
semantic embedding, affect enriched embedding increases ability of the network
to effectively identify and assign weightage to key terms responsible for
readers' emotion detection