# Classification of Hope in Textual Data using Transformer-Based Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12874 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12874/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Nov 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [Don't Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10964/) (2020)
- [GoEmotions: A Dataset of Fine-Grained Emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00547/) (2020)
- [How to Fine-Tune BERT for Text Classification?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05583/) (2019)
- [Using millions of emoji occurrences to learn any-domain representations for detecting sentiment, emotion and sarcasm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00524/) (2017)
- [EmoBank: Studying the Impact of Annotation Perspective and Representation Format on Dimensional Emotion Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01996/) (2022)
- [Sentiment Analysis: Automatically Detecting Valence, Emotions, and Other Affectual States from Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11882/) (2020)
- [PolyHope: Two-Level Hope Speech Detection from Tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14136/) (2022)
- [Optimism, Expectation, or Sarcasm? Multi-Class Hope Speech Detection in Spanish and English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17974/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a transformer-based approach for classifying hope expressions in text. We developed and compared three architectures (BERT, GPT-2, and DeBERTa) for both binary classification (Hope vs. Not Hope) and multiclass categorization (five hope-related categories). Our initial BERT implementation achieved 83.65% binary and 74.87% multiclass accuracy. In the extended comparison, BERT demonstrated superior performance (84.49% binary, 72.03% multiclass accuracy) while requiring significantly fewer computational resources (443s vs. 704s training time) than newer architectures. GPT-2 showed lowest overall accuracy (79.34% binary, 71.29% multiclass), while DeBERTa achieved moderate results (80.70% binary, 71.56% multiclass) but at substantially higher computational cost (947s for multiclass training). Error analysis revealed architecture-specific strengths in detecting nuanced hope expressions, with GPT-2 excelling at sarcasm detection (92.46% recall). This study provides a framework for computational analysis of hope, with applications in mental health and social media analysis, while demonstrating that architectural suitability may outweigh model size for specialized emotion detection tasks.