From Chatter to Matter: Addressing Critical Steps of Emotion Recognition Learning in Task-oriented Dialogue
Shutong Feng, Nurul Lubis, Benjamin Ruppik, Christian Geishauser, Michael Heck, Hsien-chin Lin, Carel van Niekerk, Renato Vukovic, Milica Gasic
Abstract
Emotion recognition in conversations (ERC) is a crucial task for building human-like conversational agents. While substantial efforts have been devoted to ERC for chit-chat dialogues, the task-oriented counterpart is largely left unattended. Directly applying chit-chat ERC models to task-oriented dialogues (ToDs) results in suboptimal performance as these models overlook key features such as the correlation between emotions and task completion in ToDs. In this paper, we propose a framework that turns a chit-chat ERC model into a task-oriented one, addressing three critical aspects: data, features and objective. First, we devise two ways of augmenting rare emotions to improve ERC performance. Second, we use dialogue states as auxiliary features to incorporate key information from the goal of the user. Lastly, we leverage a multi-aspect emotion definition in ToDs to devise a multi-task learning objective and a novel emotion-distance weighted loss function. Our framework yields significant improvements for a range of chit-chat ERC models on EmoWOZ, a large-scale dataset for user emotions in ToDs. We further investigate the generalisability of the best resulting model to predict user satisfaction in different ToD datasets. A comparison with supervised baselines shows a strong zero-shot capability, highlighting the potential usage of our framework in wider scenarios.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.sigdial-1.8
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
- Month:
- September
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Prague, Czechia
- Editors:
- Svetlana Stoyanchev, Shafiq Joty, David Schlangen, Ondrej Dusek, Casey Kennington, Malihe Alikhani
- Venue:
- SIGDIAL
- SIG:
- SIGDIAL
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 85–103
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.sigdial-1.8
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.sigdial-1.8
- Cite (ACL):
- Shutong Feng, Nurul Lubis, Benjamin Ruppik, Christian Geishauser, Michael Heck, Hsien-chin Lin, Carel van Niekerk, Renato Vukovic, and Milica Gasic. 2023. From Chatter to Matter: Addressing Critical Steps of Emotion Recognition Learning in Task-oriented Dialogue. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 85–103, Prague, Czechia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- From Chatter to Matter: Addressing Critical Steps of Emotion Recognition Learning in Task-oriented Dialogue (Feng et al., SIGDIAL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2023.sigdial-1.8.pdf