The goal of our research is to automatically retrieve the satisfaction and the frustration in real-life call-center conversations. This study focuses an industrial application in which the customer satisfaction is continuously tracked down to improve customer services. To compensate the lack of large annotated emotional databases, we explore the use of pre-trained speech representations as a form of transfer learning towards AlloSat corpus. Moreover, several studies have pointed out that emotion can be detected not only in speech but also in facial trait, in biological response or in textual information. In the context of telephone conversations, we can break down the audio information into acoustic and linguistic by using the speech signal and its transcription. Our experiments confirms the large gain in performance obtained with the use of pre-trained features. Surprisingly, we found that the linguistic content is clearly the major contributor for the prediction of satisfaction and best generalizes to unseen data. Our experiments conclude to the definitive advantage of using CamemBERT representations, however the benefit of the fusion of acoustic and linguistic modalities is not as obvious. With models learnt on individual annotations, we found that fusion approaches are more robust to the subjectivity of the annotation task. This study also tackles the problem of performances variability and intends to estimate this variability from different views: weights initialization, confidence intervals and annotation subjectivity. A deep analysis on the linguistic content investigates interpretable factors able to explain the high contribution of the linguistic modality for this task.
LTCI, Télécom-Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris（巴黎理工学院巴黎电信学院LTCI实验室）；Direction Innovation & Recherche SNCF（法国国家铁路公司创新与研究部）
Several recent studies on dyadic human-human interactions have been done on conversations without specific business objectives. However, many companies might benefit from studies dedicated to more precise environments such as after sales services or customer satisfaction surveys. In this work, we place ourselves in the scope of a live chat customer service in which we want to detect emotions and their evolution in the conversation flow. This context leads to multiple challenges that range from exploiting restricted, small and mostly unlabeled datasets to finding and adapting methods for such c…
CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology（中国科学院脑科学与智能技术卓越创新中心）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）
Different from the emotion recognition in individual utterances, we propose a multimodal learning framework using relation and dependencies among the utterances for conversational emotion analysis. The attention mechanism is applied to the fusion of the acoustic and lexical features. Then these fusion representations are fed into the self-attention based bi-directional gated recurrent unit (GRU) layer to capture long-term contextual information. To imitate real interaction patterns of different speakers, speaker embeddings are also utilized as additional inputs to distinguish the speaker ident…
Central South University（中南大学）；Hunan University（湖南大学）
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) aims to analyze the speaker's state and identify their emotion in the conversation. Recent works in ERC focus on context modeling but ignore the representation of contextual emotional tendency. In order to extract multi-modal information and the emotional tendency of the utterance effectively, we propose a new structure named Emoformer to extract multi-modal emotion vectors from different modalities and fuse them with sentence vector to be an emotion capsule. Furthermore, we design an end-to-end ERC model called EmoCaps, which extracts emotion vectors …
Speech emotion recognition is the task of recognizing the speaker's emotional state given a recording of their utterance. While most of the current approaches focus on inferring emotion from isolated utterances, we argue that this is not sufficient to achieve conversational emotion recognition (CER) which deals with recognizing emotions in conversations. In this work, we propose several approaches for CER by treating it as a sequence labeling task. We investigated transformer architecture for CER and, compared it with ResNet-34 and BiLSTM architectures in both contextual and context-less scena…
Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）；Amazon（亚马逊）
Accurately detecting emotions in conversation is a necessary yet challenging task due to the complexity of emotions and dynamics in dialogues. The emotional state of a speaker can be influenced by many different factors, such as interlocutor stimulus, dialogue scene, and topic. In this work, we propose a conversational speech emotion recognition method to deal with capturing attentive contextual dependency and speaker-sensitive interactions. First, we use a pretrained VGGish model to extract segment-based audio representation in individual utterances. Second, an attentive bi-directional gated …
Conversational emotion recognition (CER) has attracted increasing interests in the natural language processing (NLP) community. Different from the vanilla emotion recognition, effective speaker-sensitive utterance representation is one major challenge for CER. In this paper, we exploit speaker identification (SI) as an auxiliary task to enhance the utterance representation in conversations. By this method, we can learn better speaker-aware contextual representations from the additional SI corpus. Experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed architecture is highly effecti…
Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Detection in conversation is key in several real-world applications, with an increase in modalities available aiding a better understanding of the underlying emotions. Multi-modal Emotion Detection and Sentiment Analysis can be particularly useful, as applications will be able to use specific subsets of available modalities, as per the available data. Current systems dealing with Multi-modal functionality fail to leverage and capture - the context of the conversation through all modalities, the dependency between the listener(s) and speaker emotional states, and …
Emotion Rendering for Conversational Speech Synthesis with Heterogeneous Graph-Based Context Modeling
Inner Mongolian University（内蒙古大学）；ByteDance（字节跳动）；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
Emotion-Anchored Contrastive Learning Framework for Emotion Recognition in Conversation
National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University（南京大学计算机软件新技术国家重点实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University（南京大学人工智能学院）
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）
The emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) task aims to predict the emotion label of an utterance in a conversation. Since the dependencies between speakers are complex and dynamic, which consist of intra- and inter-speaker dependencies, the modeling of speaker-specific information is a vital role in ERC. Although existing researchers have proposed various methods of speaker interaction modeling, they cannot explore dynamic intra- and inter-speaker dependencies jointly, leading to the insufficient comprehension of context and further hindering emotion prediction. To this end, we design a no…
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is a crucial component in affective dialogue systems, which helps the system understand users' emotions and generate empathetic responses. However, most works focus on modeling speaker and contextual information primarily on the textual modality or simply leveraging multimodal information through feature concatenation. In order to explore a more effective way of utilizing both multimodal and long-distance contextual information, we propose a new model based on multimodal fused graph convolutional network, MMGCN, in this work. MMGCN can not only make us…
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) has attracted much attention in recent years for its necessity in widespread applications. Existing ERC methods mostly model the self and inter-speaker context separately, posing a major issue for lacking enough interaction between them. In this paper, we propose a novel Speaker and Position-Aware Graph neural network model for ERC (S+PAGE), which contains three stages to combine the benefits of both Transformer and relational graph convolution network (R-GCN) for better contextual modeling. Firstly, a two-stream conversational Transformer is presented…
GatedxLSTM: A Multimodal Affective Computing Approach for Emotion Recognition in Conversations
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国学院）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Konrad Zuse School of Excellence in Reliable AI（康拉德·祖斯可靠人工智能卓越学院）；Munich Data Science Institute（慕尼黑数据科学研究所）；Munich Center for Machine Learning（慕尼黑机器学习中心）
MSP-Conversation: A Corpus for Naturalistic, Time-Continuous Emotion Recognition
Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, University of Texas at Dallas（埃里克·乔纳森工程与计算机科学学院，德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）；Language Technologies Institute, Carnegie Mellon University（语言技术研究所，卡内基梅隆大学）；AT&T Labs Research（AT&T实验室研究）
Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) is crucial in developing sympathetic human-machine interaction. In conversational videos, emotion can be present in multiple modalities, i.e., audio, video, and transcript. However, due to the inherent characteristics of these modalities, multi-modal ERC has always been considered a challenging undertaking. Existing ERC research focuses mainly on using text information in a discussion, ignoring the other two modalities. We anticipate that emotion recognition accuracy can be improved by employing a multi-modal approach. Thus, in this study, we propose …
