Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is a sub-field of
emotion recognition
Emotion recognition is the process of identifying human emotion. People vary widely in their accuracy at recognizing the emotions of others. Use of technology to help people with emotion recognition is a relatively nascent research area. Genera ...
, that focuses on mining human
emotion
Emotions are mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is currently no scientific consensus on a definition. ...
s from conversations or
dialogue
Dialogue (sometimes spelled dialog in American English) is a written or spoken conversational exchange between two or more people, and a literary and theatrical form that depicts such an exchange. As a philosophical or didactic device, it is ...
s having two or more
interlocutors.
The datasets in this field are usually derived from
social platforms
Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social media ...
that allow free and plenty of samples, often containing
multimodal data (i.e., some combination of textual, visual, and acoustic data). Self- and inter-personal influences play critical role in identifying some basic emotions, such as,
fear
Fear is an intensely unpleasant emotion in response to perceiving or recognizing a danger or threat. Fear causes physiological changes that may produce behavioral reactions such as mounting an aggressive response or fleeing the threat. Fear ...
,
anger
Anger, also known as wrath or rage, is an intense emotional state involving a strong uncomfortable and non-cooperative response to a perceived provocation, hurt or threat.
A person experiencing anger will often experience physical effects, suc ...
, joy, surprise, etc. The more fine grained the emotion labels are the harder it is to detect the correct emotion. ERC poses a number of challenges,
such as, conversational-context modeling, speaker-state modeling, presence of sarcasm in conversation, emotion shift across consecutive utterances of the same
interlocutor.
The task
The task of ERC deals with detecting emotions expressed by the speakers in each utterance of the conversation. ERC depends on three primary
factors
Factor, a Latin word meaning "who/which acts", may refer to:
Commerce
* Factor (agent), a person who acts for, notably a mercantile and colonial agent
* Factor (Scotland), a person or firm managing a Scottish estate
* Factors of production, suc ...
– the conversational context,
interlocutors' mental state, and intent.
Datasets
IEMOCAP, SEMAINE, DailyDialogue, and MELD are the four widely used datasets in ERC. Among these four datasets, MELD contains multiparty dialogues.
Methods
Approaches to ERC consist of
unsupervised, semi-unsupervised, and
supervised methods. Popular supervised methods include using or combining pre-defined features,
recurrent neural network
A recurrent neural network (RNN) is a class of artificial neural networks where connections between nodes can create a cycle, allowing output from some nodes to affect subsequent input to the same nodes. This allows it to exhibit temporal dynamic ...
s (DialogueRNN), graph convolutional networks (DialogueGCN ), and attention gated hierarchical memory network.
Most of the contemporary methods for ERC are deep learning based and rely on the idea of latent speaker-state modeling.
Emotion Cause Recognition in Conversation
Recently a new subtask of ERC has emerged that focuses on recognising emotion cause in conversation.
Methods to solve this task rely on language models-based question answering mechanism. RECCON
is one of the key datasets for this task.
See also
*
Emotion recognition
Emotion recognition is the process of identifying human emotion. People vary widely in their accuracy at recognizing the emotions of others. Use of technology to help people with emotion recognition is a relatively nascent research area. Genera ...
*
Sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining or emotion AI) is the use of natural language processing, text analysis, computational linguistics, and biometrics to systematically identify, extract, quantify, and study affective states and subjec ...
References
{{Nonverbal communication, fi
Emotion
Applications of artificial intelligence
