Adaptive multitask emotion recognition and sentiment analysis using resource-constrained MobileBERT and DistilBERT: an efficient approach for edge devices
Muhammad Hussain, Caikou Chen, Muhammad Anwar, Sara Abdelwahab Ghorashi, Ali Ahmed, Muhammad Sheraz Arshad Malik, Iqra Yamin · PeerJ Computer Science · 2025
Emotion recognition and sentiment analysis are crucial tasks in natural language processing, enabling machines to understand human emotions and opinions. However, the complex, nuanced relationship between emotions and sentiment in conversation poses significant challenges to accurate emotion recognition, as sentiment cues can be easily misinterpreted. Deploying emotion recognition and sentiment analysis tasks on edge devices poses substantial challenges due to computational resource constraints. We present an adaptive multitask learning approach that jointly leverages resource-constrained Mobile Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (MobileBERT) and Distilled BERT (DistilBERT) models to optimise emotion recognition and sentiment analysis. Our proposed approach utilises prototypical networks to learn effective representations of emotions and sentiment, while a focal weighted loss function effectively mitigates the class imbalance. We adaptively fine-tune the learning process to balance task importance and resource utilisation, resulting in better performance and efficiency. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our method, achieving the best results on MELD and IEMOCAP benchmark datasets while keeping a compact model size. Despite limited computational demands, our solution demonstrates that emotion and sentiment analysis can deliver performance comparable to resource-intensive large language models (LLMs). Facilitating various applications in human-computer interaction, affective computing, social media, dialogue conversion, and healthcare.