The long-standing goal of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been to create human-like conversational systems. Such systems should have the ability to develop an emotional connection with the users, consequently, emotion recognition in dialogues has gained popularity. Emotion detection in dialogues is a challenging task because humans usually convey multiple emotions with varying degrees of intensities in a single utterance. Moreover, emotion in an utterance of a dialogue may be dependent on previous utterances making the task more complex. Recently, emotion recognition in low-resource languages like Hindi has been in great demand. However, most of the existing datasets for multi-label emotion and intensity detection in conversations are in English. To this end, we propose a large conversational dataset in Hindi named EmoInHindi for multi-label emotion and intensity recognition in conversations containing 1,814 dialogues with a total of 44,247 utterances. We prepare our dataset in a Wizard-of-Oz manner for mental health and legal counselling of crime victims. Each utterance of dialogue is annotated with one or more emotion categories from 16 emotion labels including neutral and their corresponding intensity. We further propose strong contextual baselines that can detect the emotion(s) and corresponding emotional intensity of an utterance given the conversational context.

In this paper, we hypothesize that humor is closely related to sentiment and emotions. Also, due to the tremendous growth in multilingual content, there is a great demand for building models and systems that support multilingual information access. To end this, we first extend the recently released Multimodal Multiparty Hindi Humor (M2H2) dataset by adding parallel English utterances corresponding to Hindi utterances and then annotating each utterance with sentiment and emotion classes. We name it Sentiment, Humor, and Emotion aware Multilingual Multimodal Multiparty Dataset (SHEMuD). Therefore, we propose a multitask framework wherein the primary task is humor detection, and the auxiliary tasks are sentiment and emotion identification. We design a multitasking framework wherein we first propose a Context Transformer to capture the deep contextual relationships with the input utterances. We then propose a Sentiment and Emotion aware Embedding (SE-Embedding) to get the overall representation of a particular emotion and sentiment w.r.t. the specific humor situation. Experimental results on the SHEMuD show the efficacy of our approach and shows that multitask learning offers an improvement over the single-task framework for both monolingual (4.86 points in Hindi and 5.9 points in English in F1-score) and multilingual (5.17 points in F1-score) setting.

Mental health is a critical component of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly Goal 3, which aims to provide “good health and well-being”. The present mental health treatment gap is exacerbated by stigma, lack of human resources, and lack of research capability for implementation and policy reform. We present and discuss a novel task of detecting emotional reasoning (ER) and accompanying emotions in conversations. In particular, we create a first-of-its-kind multimodal mental health conversational corpus that is manually annotated at the utterance level with emotional reasoning and related emotion. We develop a multimodal multitask framework with a novel multimodal feature fusion technique and a contextuality learning module to handle the two tasks. Leveraging multimodal sources of information, commonsense reasoning, and through a multitask framework, our proposed model produces strong results. We achieve performance gains of 6% accuracy and 4.62% F1 on the emotion detection task and 3.56% accuracy and 3.31% F1 on the ER detection task, when compared to the existing state-of-the-art model.