Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is essential for dialogue systems to identify the emotions expressed by speakers. Although previous studies have made significant progress, accurate recognition and interpretation of similar fine-grained emotion properly accounting for individual variability remains a challenge. One particular under-explored area is the role of individual beliefs and desires in modelling emotion. Inspired by the Belief-Desire Theory of Emotion, we propose a novel method for conversational emotion recognition that incorporates both belief and desire to accurately identify emotions. We extract emotion-eliciting events from utterances and construct graphs that represent beliefs and desires in conversations. By applying message passing between nodes, our graph effectively models the utterance context, speaker’s global state, and the interaction between emotional beliefs, desires, and utterances. We evaluate our model’s performance by conducting extensive experiments on four popular ERC datasets and comparing it with multiple state-of-the-art models. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model and validate the effectiveness of each module in the model.

To overcome the overparameterized problem in Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), pruning is widely used as a simple and straightforward compression method by directly removing unimportant weights. Previous first-order methods successfully compress PLMs to extremely high sparsity with little performance drop. These methods, such as movement pruning, use first-order information to prune PLMs while fine-tuning the remaining weights. In this work, we argue fine-tuning is redundant for first-order pruning, since first-order pruning is sufficient to converge PLMs to downstream tasks without fine-tuning. Under this motivation, we propose Static Model Pruning (SMP), which only uses first-order pruning to adapt PLMs to downstream tasks while achieving the target sparsity level. In addition, we also design a new masking function and training objective to further improve SMP. Extensive experiments at various sparsity levels show SMP has significant improvements over first-order and zero-order methods. Unlike previous first-order methods, SMP is also applicable to low sparsity and outperforms zero-order methods. Meanwhile, SMP is more parameter efficient than other methods due to it does not require fine-tuning.

Humor plays important role in human communication, which makes it important problem for natural language processing. Prior work on the analysis of humor focuses on whether text is humorous or not, or the degree of funniness, but this is insufficient to explain why it is funny. We therefore create a dataset on humor with 9,123 manually annotated jokes in Chinese. We propose a novel annotation scheme to give scenarios of how humor arises in text. Specifically, our annotations of linguistic humor not only contain the degree of funniness, like previous work, but they also contain key words that trigger humor as well as character relationship, scene, and humor categories. We report reasonable agreement between annota-tors. We also conduct an analysis and exploration of the dataset. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to approach humor annotation for exploring the underlying mechanism of the use of humor, which may contribute to a significantly deeper analysis of humor. We also contribute with a scarce and valuable dataset, which we will release publicly.