Contextual Graph Reconstruction and Emotional Variation Learning for Conversational Emotion Recognition

Conversational Emotion Recognition (CER) significantly benefits from the integration of multiple modalities. However, real-world scenarios are often plagued by hardware malfunctions and network failures that lead to missing modalities and incomplete emotional representations. Existing methods primarily focus on modeling inter-modal relationships within isolated utterances to generate missing data, so they do not adequately capture conversational context and dynamic emotional evolution. In conversations, emotional expressions are inherently context-dependent and dynamic. Insufficient modeling of these properties can substantially degrade performance. To address these challenges, we propose Contextual Graph Reconstruction and Emotional Variation Learning (CGR-EVL). Our approach flexibly constructs an utterance graph with diverse coverage based on speaker activity and modality availability, thereby capturing more contextual information. To enhance the handling of missing modalities, we further integrate temporal relations through a relational graph convolutional network to reconstruct missing features and introduce a speaker emotion-aware constraint to ensure emotional coherence. Additionally, we propose the concept of emotional entropy to quantify variation patterns and develop a novel loss function that aligns predicted and actual variations. Experiments on the IEMOCAP and MELD datasets show that CGR-EVL outperforms state-of-the-art methods, particularly under conditions of incomplete modalities.