Emotion Detection for Conversations Based on Reinforcement Learning Framework

Xiangdong Huang, Minjie Ren, Qiankun Han, Xiaoqi Shi, Jie Nie, Weizhi Nie, An-An Liu

Abstract: In this article, we propose a novel reinforcement learning network that keeps track of the gradual emotional changes from every utterance throughout the conversation and uses this information for each utterance’s emotion detection. Concretely, we first establish an agent and, then, utilize sliding windows to extract the accumulated emotional information before the current utterance. We define the concatenation of accumulated emotional information and the contextual information as the state of the reinforcement learning framework. The action of the established agent is formulated as the emotional label of the current utterance. On this basis, we formulate the progressive emotional interaction process throughout the conversation as a sequential decision problem and solve it with the reinforcement learning framework. Detailed evaluations on the published multimodal MELD dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.