PEMV: Improving Spatial Distribution for Emotion Recognition in Conversations Using Proximal Emotion Mean Vectors

Chen Lin, Fei Li, Donghong Ji, Chong Teng


Abstract
Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) aims to identify the emotions expressed in each utterance within a dialogue. Existing research primarily focuses on the analysis of contextual structure in dialogue and the interactions between different emotions. Nonetheless, ERC datasets often contain difficult-to-classify samples and suffer from imbalanced label distributions, which pose challenges to the spatial distribution of dialogue features. To tackle this issue, we propose a method that generates Proximal Emotion Mean Vectors (PEMV) based on emotion feature queues to optimize the spatial representation of text features. We design a Center Loss based on PEMVs to pull hard-to-classify samples closer to their respective category centers and employ Angle Loss to maximize the angular separation between different PEMVs. Furthermore, we utilize PEMV as a classifier to better adapt to the spatial structure of dialogue features. Extensive experiments on three widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and validates its effectiveness in optimizing feature space representations.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-naacl.20
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
345–357
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.findings-naacl.20/
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Cite (ACL):
Chen Lin, Fei Li, Donghong Ji, and Chong Teng. 2025. PEMV: Improving Spatial Distribution for Emotion Recognition in Conversations Using Proximal Emotion Mean Vectors. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025, pages 345–357, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PEMV: Improving Spatial Distribution for Emotion Recognition in Conversations Using Proximal Emotion Mean Vectors (Lin et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.findings-naacl.20.pdf