Supervised Prototypical Contrastive Learning for Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Xiaohui Song, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Songlin Hu


Abstract
Capturing emotions within a conversation plays an essential role in modern dialogue systems. However, the weak correlation between emotions and semantics brings many challenges to emotion recognition in conversation (ERC). Even semantically similar utterances, the emotion may vary drastically depending on contexts or speakers. In this paper, we propose a Supervised Prototypical Contrastive Learning (SPCL) loss for the ERC task. Leveraging the Prototypical Network, the SPCL targets at solving the imbalanced classification problem through contrastive learning and does not require a large batch size. Meanwhile, we design a difficulty measure function based on the distance between classes and introduce curriculum learning to alleviate the impact of extreme samples. We achieve state-of-the-art results on three widely used benchmarks. Further, we conduct analytical experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed SPCL and curriculum learning strategy.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.347
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5197–5206
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.347
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.347
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaohui Song, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, and Songlin Hu. 2022. Supervised Prototypical Contrastive Learning for Emotion Recognition in Conversation. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 5197–5206, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Supervised Prototypical Contrastive Learning for Emotion Recognition in Conversation (Song et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.347.pdf