Dialogue act (DA) recognition is usually realized from a speech signal that is transcribed and segmented into text. However, only a little work in DA recognition from images exists. Therefore, this paper concentrates on this modality and presents a novel DA recognition approach for image documents, namely comic books. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study investigating dialogue acts from comic books and represents the first steps to building a model for comic book understanding. The proposed method is composed of the following steps: speech balloon segmentation, optical character recognition (OCR), and DA recognition itself. We use YOLOv8 for balloon segmentation, Google Vision for OCR, and Transformer-based models for DA classification. The experiments are performed on a newly created dataset comprising 1,438 annotated comic panels. It contains bounding boxes, transcriptions, and dialogue act annotation. We have achieved nearly 98% average precision for speech balloon segmentation and exceeded the accuracy of 70% for the DA recognition task. We also present an analysis of dialogue structure in the comics domain and compare it with the standard DA datasets, representing another contribution of this paper.

In this paper, we present an approach for solving SemEval-2024 Task 3: The Competition of Multimodal Emotion Cause Analysis in Conversations. The task includes two subtasks that focus on emotion-cause pair extraction using text, video, and audio modalities. Our approach is composed of encoding all modalities (MFCC and Wav2Vec for audio, 3D-CNN for video, and transformer-based models for text) and combining them in an utterance-level fusion module. The model is then optimized for link and emotion prediction simultaneously. Our approach achieved 6th place in both subtasks. The full leaderboard can be found at https://codalab.lisn.upsaclay.fr/competitions/16141#results