EmotionIC: emotional inertia and contagion-driven dependency modeling for emotion recognition in conversation

Emotion recognition in conversation(ERC) has attracted growing attention in recent years as a result of the advancement and implementation of human-computer interface technologies. In this paper,we propose an emotional inertia and contagion-driven dependency modeling approach(EmotionIC) for ERC tasks. Our EmotionIC consists of three main components, i.e., identity masked multi-head attention(IMMHA), dialogue-based gated recurrent unit(DiaGRU), and skip-chain conditional random field(SkipCRF).Compared to previous ERC models, EmotionIC can model a conversation more thoroughly at both the feature-extraction and classification levels. The proposed model attempts to integrate the advantages of attention-and recurrence-based methods at the feature-extraction level. Specifically, IMMHA is applied to capture identity-based global contextual dependencies, while Dia GRU is utilized to extract speaker-and temporal-aware local contextual information. At the classification level, SkipCRF can explicitly mine complex emotional flows from higher-order neighboring utterances in the conversation. Experimental results show that our method can significantly outperform the state-of-the-art models on four benchmark datasets.The ablation studies confirm that our modules can effectively model emotional inertia and contagion.