BeMERC: Behavior-Aware MLLM-based Framework for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Multimodal emotion recognition in conversation (MERC), the task of identifying the emotion label for each utterance in a conversation, is vital for developing empathetic machines. Current MLLM-based MERC studies focus mainly on capturing the speaker's textual or vocal characteristics, but ignore the significance of video-derived behavior information. Different from text and audio inputs, learning videos with rich facial expression, body language and posture, provides emotion trigger signals to the models for more accurate emotion predictions. In this paper, we propose a novel behavior-aware MLLM-based framework (BeMERC) to incorporate speaker's behaviors, including subtle facial micro-expression, body language and posture, into a vanilla MLLM-based MERC model, thereby facilitating the modeling of emotional dynamics during a conversation. Furthermore, BeMERC adopts a two-stage instruction tuning strategy to extend the model to the conversations scenario for end-to-end training of a MERC predictor. Experiments demonstrate that BeMERC achieves superior performance than the state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets, and also provides a detailed discussion on the significance of video-derived behavior information in MERC.

CKERC : Joint Large Language Models with Commonsense Knowledge for Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is a task which predicts the emotion of an utterance in the context of a conversation. It tightly depends on dialogue context, speaker identity information, multiparty dialogue scenario and so on. However, the state-of-the-art method (instructERC) solely identifying speaker, and ignores commonsense knowledge(i.e., reaction of the listeners and intention of the speaker, etc.) behind speakers during a conversation, which can deeply mine speaker information. To this end, we propose a novel joint large language models with commonsense knowledge framework for emotion recognition in conversation, namely CKERC.We design prompts to generate interlocutors' commonsense based on historical utterances with large language model. And we use the interlocutor commonsense identification task for LLM pre-training to fine-tune speaker implicit clues information.By solving above challenge, our method achieve state-of-the-art.We extensive experiment on three widely-used datasets, i.e., IEMOCAP, MELD, EmoryNLP, demonstrate our method superiority. Also, we conduct in-depth analysis and further demonstrate the effectiveness of commonsense knowledge in ERC task in large language model.