Papers › A Hierarchical Transformer with Speaker Modeling for Emotion Recognition in Conversation

A Hierarchical Transformer with Speaker Modeling for Emotion Recognition in Conversation

29 Dec 2020arXiv:2012.14781archive 2025-07-28

Jiangnan Li, Zheng Lin, Peng Fu, Qingyi Si, Weiping Wang

Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) is a more challenging task than conventional text emotion recognition. It can be regarded as a personalized and interactive emotion recognition task, which is supposed to consider not only the semantic information of text but also the influences from speakers. The current method models speakers' interactions by building a relation between every two speakers. However, this fine-grained but complicated modeling is computationally expensive, hard to extend, and can only consider local context. To address this problem, we simplify the complicated modeling to a binary version: Intra-Speaker and Inter-Speaker dependencies, without identifying every unique speaker for the targeted speaker. To better achieve the simplified interaction modeling of speakers in Transformer, which shows excellent ability to settle long-distance dependency, we design three types of masks and respectively utilize them in three independent Transformer blocks. The designed masks respectively model the conventional context modeling, Intra-Speaker dependency, and Inter-Speaker dependency. Furthermore, different speaker-aware information extracted by Transformer blocks diversely contributes to the prediction, and therefore we utilize the attention mechanism to automatically weight them. Experiments on two ERC datasets indicate that our model is efficacious to achieve better performance.

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Code

leqsnan/skaig-erc officialpytorch report

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Tasks

Emotion RecognitionEmotion Recognition in Conversation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Emotion Recognition in Conversation IEMOCAP TRMSM-Att Weighted-F1 65.94 #40 of 59 Archive leaderboard report
Emotion Recognition in Conversation MELD TRMSM-Att Weighted-F1 62.36 #48 of 68 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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