Semantic and Emotional Dual Channel for Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Abstract

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) aims at accurately identifying emotional states expressed in conversational content. Existing ERC methods, although relying on semantic understanding, often encounter challenges when confronted with incomplete or misleading semantic information. In addition, when dealing with the interaction between emotional and semantic information, existing methods are often difficult to effectively distinguish the complex relationship between the two, which affects the accuracy of emotion recognition. To address the problems of semantic misdirection and emotional cross-talk encountered by traditional models when confronted with complex conversational data, we propose a semantic and emotional dual channel (SEDC) strategy for emotion recognition in conversations to process emotional and semantic information independently. Under this strategy, emotion information provides an auxiliary recognition function when the semantics are unclear or lacking, enhancing the accuracy of the model. Our model consists of two modules: the emotion processing module accurately captures the emotional features of each utterance through contrastive learning, and then constructs a dialogue emotion propagation map to simulate the emotional information conveyed in the dialogue; the semantic processing module combines an external knowledge base to enhance the semantic expression of the dialogue through knowledge enhancement strategies. This divide-and-conquer approach allows us to more deeply analyze the emotional and semantic dimensions of complex dialogues. Experimental results on the IEMOCAP, EmoryNLP, MELD, and DailyDialog datasets show that our approach significantly outperforms existing techniques and effectively improves the accuracy of dialogue emotion recognition.