Explainable Multi-Emotion Mental Health Classification from Twitter Emotions Dataset Using Bidirectional GRU with LIME

• Author(s): Awaz Bhujel; Dr. M. N. Nachappa
• Paper ID: 1718014
• Page: 2745-2756
• Published Date: 19-05-2026
• Published In: Iconic Research And Engineering Journals
• Publisher: IRE Journals
• e-ISSN: 2456-8880
• Volume/Issue: Volume 9 Issue 11 May-2026

Abstract

Social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter) have become common places where people share their feelings. These emotional expressions can sometimes reveal early signs of mental health conditions. However, detecting multiple emotions at the same time from short, casual social media posts is still a difficult task. Most previous studies either focus only on positive and negative sentiment or try to identify just one emotion per post. This leaves a clear gap in systems that can recognize several emotions together and explain how they reached their decisions. In this paper, we propose an explainable deep learning framework for multi-emotion mental health classification using the Twitter Emotions Dataset. We built a balanced dataset of 60,000 tweets covering six emotion categories: anger, fear, joy, love, sadness, and surprise. We then compared five deep learning models (LSTM, GRU, BiLSTM, BiGRU, and BiLSTM with Bahdanau attention) against three traditional machine learning methods (Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, and XGBoost). Among all models, the Bidirectional GRU (BiGRU) achieved the best classification performance. It proved particularly good at capturing context from both directions in short text. To meet the need for interpretability in mental health applications, we applied Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) to the BiGRU model. LIME produced word-level visualizations showing which words contributed most to each of the six emotion predic-tions. These explanations make the model’s behavior transparent and support trustworthy AI in mental health monitoring.

Keywords

Explainable AI (XAI), Mental Health, Multi-Emotion Classification, BiGRU, LIME, Twitter Dataset, Deep Learning, NLP, Sentiment Analysis

Citations

IRE Journals:
Awaz Bhujel, Dr. M. N. Nachappa "Explainable Multi-Emotion Mental Health Classification from Twitter Emotions Dataset Using Bidirectional GRU with LIME" Iconic Research And Engineering Journals Volume 9 Issue 11 2026 Page 2745-2756 https://doi.org/10.64388/IREV9I11-1718014

IEEE:
Awaz Bhujel, Dr. M. N. Nachappa "Explainable Multi-Emotion Mental Health Classification from Twitter Emotions Dataset Using Bidirectional GRU with LIME" Iconic Research And Engineering Journals, 9(11) https://doi.org/10.64388/IREV9I11-1718014