Modeling both Context- and Speaker-Sensitive Dependence for Emotion Detection in Multi-speaker Conversations

Modeling both Context- and Speaker-Sensitive Dependence for Emotion Detection in Multi-speaker Conversations

Dong Zhang, Liangqing Wu, Changlong Sun, Shoushan Li, Qiaoming Zhu, Guodong Zhou

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 5415-5421. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/752

Recently, emotion detection in conversations becomes a hot research topic in the Natural Language Processing community. In this paper, we focus on emotion detection in multi-speaker conversations instead of traditional two-speaker conversations in existing studies. Different from non-conversation text, emotion detection in conversation text has one specific challenge in modeling the context-sensitive dependence. Besides, emotion detection in multi-speaker conversations endorses another specific challenge in modeling the speaker-sensitive dependence. To address above two challenges, we propose a conversational graph-based convolutional neural network. On the one hand, our approach represents each utterance and each speaker as a node. On the other hand, the context-sensitive dependence is represented by an undirected edge between two utterances nodes from the same conversation and the speaker-sensitive dependence is represented by an undirected edge between an utterance node and its speaker node. In this way, the entire conversational corpus can be symbolized as a large heterogeneous graph and the emotion detection task can be recast as a classification problem of the utterance nodes in the graph. The experimental results on a multi-modal and multi-speaker conversation corpus demonstrate the great effectiveness of the proposed approach.
Keywords:
Natural Language Processing: Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Processing: Sentiment Analysis and Text Mining