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.

This paper describes our system created for the WASSA 2018 Implicit Emotion Shared Task. The goal of this task is to predict the emotion of a given tweet, from which a certain emotion word is removed. The removed word can be sad, happy, disgusted, angry, afraid or a synonym of one of them. Our proposed system is based on deep-learning methods. We use Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) with word embeddings as an input. Pre-trained DeepMoji model and pre-trained emoji2vec emoji embeddings are also used as additional inputs. Our System achieves 0.657 macro F1 score and our rank is 13th out of 30.