Emotional Knowledge Self-Distillation in Dialogue

Recognizing emotions in dialogues is vital for effective human-computer interaction, yet remains a challenging task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Previous studies in Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) have primarily focused on contextual features, while overlooking the importance of emotional features in emotion recognition. To address this gap, we focus on the role of emotional features in ERC and propose a novel method, Emotional Knowledge Self-Distillation (EmoKSD<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup>), to enhance the model’s emotional sensitivity. In EmoKSD, utterances are enriched with implicit ⟨mask⟩ tokens to represent conveyed emotions, allowing the distillation of emotional knowledge from explicit emotional tokens to implicit ⟨mask⟩ tokens, thereby enhancing the model’s ability to perceive subtle emotions within the dialogue. Through thorough evaluations on two public ERC datasets (i.e., IEMOCAP and MELD) using proposed coarse-grained utterance distillation and fine-grained token distillation techniques, EmoKSD demonstrates superior performance compared to existing methods, highlighting the significance of emotional features in ERC.