Previous works on emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) follow a two-step paradigm, which can be summarized as first producing context-independent features via fine-tuning pretrained language models (PLMs) and then analyzing contextual information and dialogue structure information among the extracted features. However, we discover that this paradigm has several limitations. Accordingly, we propose a novel paradigm, i.e., exploring contextual information and dialogue structure information in the fine-tuning step, and adapting the PLM to the ERC task in terms of input text, classification structure, and training strategy. Furthermore, we develop our model BERT-ERC according to the proposed paradigm, which improves ERC performance in three aspects, namely suggestive text, fine-grained classification module, and two-stage training. Compared to existing methods, BERT-ERC achieves substantial improvement on four datasets, indicating its effectiveness and generalization capability. Besides, we also set up the limited resources scenario and the online prediction scenario to approximate real-world scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed paradigm significantly outperforms the previous one and can be adapted to various scenes.
@article{arxiv.2301.06745,
title = {BERT-ERC: Fine-tuning BERT is Enough for Emotion Recognition in Conversation},
author = {Xiangyu Qin and Zhiyu Wu and Jinshi Cui and Tingting Zhang and Yanran Li and Jian Luan and Bin Wang and Li Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.06745},
year = {2023}
}