Beyond Single Emotion: Multi-label Approach to Conversational Emotion Recognition

Abstract

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) has been promoted with diverse approaches in the recent years. However, many studies have pointed out that emotion shift and confusing labels make it difficult for models to distinguish between different emotions. Existing ERC models suffer from these problems when the emotions are forced to be mapped into single label. In this paper, we utilize our strategies for extending single label to multi-labels. We then propose a multi-label classification framework for emotion recognition in conversation (ML-ERC). Specifically, we introduce weighted supervised contrastive learning tailored for multi-label, which can easily applied to previous ERC models. The empirical results on existing task with single label support the efficacy of our approach, which is more effective in the most challenging settings: emotion shift or confusing labels. We also evaluate ML-ERC with the multi-labels we produced to support our contrastive learning scheme.