Emotion Train at SemEval-2025 Task 11: Comparing Generative and Discriminative Models in Emotion Recognition

AbstractThe emotion recognition task has become increasingly popular as it has a wide range of applications in many fields, such as mental health, product management, and population mood state monitoring. SemEval 2025 Task 11 Track A framed the emotion recognition problem as a multi-label classification task. This paper presents our proposed system submissions in the following languages: English, Algerian and Moroccan Arabic, Brazilian and Mozambican Portuguese, German, Spanish, Nigerian-Pidgin, Russian, and Swedish. Here, we compare the emotion-detecting abilities of generative and discriminative pre-trained language models, exploring multiple approaches, including curriculum learning, in-context learning, and instruction and few-shot fine-tuning. We also propose an extended architecture method with a feature fusion technique enriched with emotion scores and a self-attention mechanism. We find that BERT-based models fine-tuned on data of a corresponding language achieve the best results across multiple languages for multi-label text-based emotion classification, outperforming both baseline and generative models.