UniMEEC: Towards Unified Multimodal Emotion Recognition and Emotion Cause

Guimin Hu, Zhihong Zhu, Daniel Hershcovich, Lijie Hu, Hasti Seifi, Jiayuan Xie


Abstract
Multimodal emotion recognition in conversation (MERC) and multimodal emotion-cause pair extraction (MECPE) have recently garnered significant attention. Emotions are the expression of affect or feelings; responses to specific events, or situations – known as emotion causes. Both collectively explain the causality between human emotion and intents. However, existing works treat emotion recognition and emotion cause extraction as two individual problems, ignoring their natural causality. In this paper, we propose a Unified Multimodal Emotion recognition and Emotion-Cause analysis framework (UniMEEC) to explore the causality between emotion and emotion cause. Concretely, UniMEEC reformulates the MERC and MECPE tasks as mask prediction problems and unifies them with a causal prompt template. To differentiate the modal effects, UniMEEC proposes a multimodal causal prompt to probe the pre-trained knowledge specified to modality and implements cross-task and cross-modality interactions under task-oriented settings. Experiment results on four public benchmark datasets verify the model performance on MERC and MECPE tasks and achieve consistent improvements compared with the previous state-of-the-art methods.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.302
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5248–5261
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.302
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Guimin Hu, Zhihong Zhu, Daniel Hershcovich, Lijie Hu, Hasti Seifi, and Jiayuan Xie. 2024. UniMEEC: Towards Unified Multimodal Emotion Recognition and Emotion Cause. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 5248–5261, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
UniMEEC: Towards Unified Multimodal Emotion Recognition and Emotion Cause (Hu et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.302.pdf