Hierarchically stacked graph convolution for emotion recognition in conversation

Abstract

Accurate emotion recognition can drive the robot to understand human affection intentions precisely and deliver the emotional response when communicating with a person. Recently, graph structure has been applied to explicitly capture the self and inter-dependencies of speakers in the conversation. However, the performance of the method is limited by inadequate discriminative information extraction based on naive graph convolution. In this paper, we propose a novel Hierarchically Stacked Graph Convolution Framework (HSGCF), which leverages hierarchical structure to extract emotional discriminative features. The proposed HSGCF uses five graph convolution layers connected hierarchically to establish a more discriminative emotional feature extractor. More importantly, to mitigate the over-smooth problem caused by deeper networks, Transformer structures with residual connection are introduced into HSGCF. Experimental results on the IEMOCAP benchmark dataset indicate the proposed framework achieves a 4.12% improvement in accuracy and a 4.80% improvement in F1 score compared with the baseline method.