Affect Recognition in Conversations Using Large Language Models

Shutong Feng, Guangzhi Sun, Nurul Lubis, Wen Wu, Chao Zhang, Milica Gasic


Abstract
Affect recognition, encompassing emotions, moods, and feelings, plays a pivotal role in human communication. In the realm of conversational artificial intelligence, the ability to discern and respond to human affective cues is a critical factor for creating engaging and empathetic interactions. This study investigates the capacity of large language models (LLMs) to recognise human affect in conversations, with a focus on both open-domain chit-chat dialogues and task-oriented dialogues. Leveraging three diverse datasets, namely IEMOCAP (Busso et al., 2008), EmoWOZ (Feng et al., 2022), and DAIC-WOZ (Gratch et al., 2014), covering a spectrum of dialogues from casual conversations to clinical interviews, we evaluate and compare LLMs’ performance in affect recognition. Our investigation explores the zero-shot and few-shot capabilities of LLMs through in-context learning as well as their model capacities through task-specific fine-tuning. Additionally, this study takes into account the potential impact of automatic speech recognition errors on LLM predictions. With this work, we aim to shed light on the extent to which LLMs can replicate human-like affect recognition capabilities in conversations.
Anthology ID:
2024.sigdial-1.23
Volume:
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
September
Year:
2024
Address:
Kyoto, Japan
Editors:
Tatsuya Kawahara, Vera Demberg, Stefan Ultes, Koji Inoue, Shikib Mehri, David Howcroft, Kazunori Komatani
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
259–273
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.23
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.sigdial-1.23
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shutong Feng, Guangzhi Sun, Nurul Lubis, Wen Wu, Chao Zhang, and Milica Gasic. 2024. Affect Recognition in Conversations Using Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 259–273, Kyoto, Japan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Affect Recognition in Conversations Using Large Language Models (Feng et al., SIGDIAL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.23.pdf