Learning More from Mixed Emotions: A Label Refinement Method for Emotion Recognition in Conversations

Abstract One-hot labels are commonly employed as ground truth in Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC). However, this approach may not fully encompass all the emotions conveyed in a single utterance, leading to suboptimal performance. Regrettably, current ERC datasets lack comprehensive emotionally distributed labels. To address this issue, we propose the Emotion Label Refinement (EmoLR) method, which utilizes context- and speaker-sensitive information to infer mixed emotional labels. EmoLR comprises an Emotion Predictor (EP) module and a Label Refinement (LR) module. The EP module recognizes emotions and provides context/speaker states for the LR module. Subsequently, the LR module calculates the similarity between these states and ground-truth labels, generating a refined label distribution (RLD). The RLD captures a more comprehensive range of emotions than the original one-hot labels. These refined labels are then used for model training in place of the one-hot labels. Experimental results on three public conversational datasets demonstrate that our EmoLR achieves state-of-the-art performance.