LaERC-S: Improving LLM-based Emotion Recognition in Conversation with Speaker Characteristics

Yumeng Fu, Junjie Wu, Zhongjie Wang, Meishan Zhang, Lili Shan, Yulin Wu, Bingquan Liu


Abstract
Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC), the task of discerning human emotions for each utterance within a conversation, has garnered significant attention in human-computer interaction systems. Previous ERC studies focus on speaker-specific information that predominantly stems from relationships among utterances, which lacks sufficient information around conversations. Recent research in ERC has sought to exploit pre-trained large language models (LLMs) with speaker modelling to comprehend emotional states. Although these methods have achieved the encouraging results, the extracted speaker-specific information struggles to indicate emotional dynamics. In this paper, motivated by the fact that speaker characteristics play a crucial role and LLMs have rich world knowledge, we present LaERC-S, a novel framework that stimulates LLMs to explore speaker characteristics involving the mental state and behavior of interlocutors, for accurate emotion predictions. To endow LLMs with these knowledge information, we adopt the two-stage learning to make the models reason speaker characteristics and track the emotion of the speaker in complex conversation scenarios. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of LaERC-S, reaching the new state-of-the-art.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.451
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6748–6761
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.451/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yumeng Fu, Junjie Wu, Zhongjie Wang, Meishan Zhang, Lili Shan, Yulin Wu, and Bingquan Liu. 2025. LaERC-S: Improving LLM-based Emotion Recognition in Conversation with Speaker Characteristics. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 6748–6761, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LaERC-S: Improving LLM-based Emotion Recognition in Conversation with Speaker Characteristics (Fu et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.451.pdf