DER-GCN: Dialog and Event Relation-Aware Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Multimodal Dialog Emotion Recognition

With the continuous development of deep learning (DL), the task of multimodal dialog emotion recognition (MDER) has recently received extensive research attention, which is also an essential branch of DL. The MDER aims to identify the emotional information contained in different modalities, e.g., text, video, and audio, and in different dialog scenes. However, the existing research has focused on modeling contextual semantic information and dialog relations between speakers while ignoring the impact of event relations on emotion. To tackle the above issues, we propose a novel dialog and event relation-aware graph convolutional neural network (DER-GCN) for multimodal emotion recognition method. It models dialog relations between speakers and captures latent event relations information. Specifically, we construct a weighted multirelationship graph to simultaneously capture the dependencies between speakers and event relations in a dialog. Moreover, we also introduce a self-supervised masked graph autoencoder (SMGAE) to improve the fusion representation ability of features and structures. Next, we design a new multiple information Transformer (MIT) to capture the correlation between different relations, which can provide a better fuse of the multivariate information between relations. Finally, we propose a loss optimization strategy based on contrastive learning to enhance the representation learning ability of minority class features. We conduct extensive experiments on the benchmark datasets, Interactive Emotional Dyadic Motion Capture (IEMOCAP) and Multimodal EmotionLines Dataset (MELD), which verify the effectiveness of the DER-GCN model. The results demonstrate that our model significantly improves both the average accuracy and the value of emotion recognition. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/yuntaoshou/DER-GCN.