Abstract
Many attempts have been made to overcome the challenges of automating textual emotion detection using different traditional deep learning models such as LSTM, GRU, and BiLSTM. But the problem with these models is that they need large datasets, massive computing resources, and a lot of time to train. Also, they are prone to forgetting and cannot perform well when applied to small datasets. In this paper, we aim to demonstrate the capability of transfer learning techniques to capture the better contextual meaning of the text and as a result better detection of the emotion represented in the text, even without a large amount of data and training time. To do this, we conduct an experiment utilizing a pre-trained model called EmotionalBERT, which is based on bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), and we compare its performance to RNN-based models on two benchmark datasets, with a focus on the amount of training data and how it affects the models' performance.