Akan Cinematic Emotions (ACE): A Multimodal Multi-party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Movie Dialogues

ACL ARR 2025 February Submission5041 Authors

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce the Akan Conversation Emotion (ACE) dataset, the first multimodal emotion dialogue dataset for an African language, addressing the significant lack of resources for low-resource languages in emotion recognition research. ACE, developed for the Akan language, contains 385 emotion-labeled dialogues and 6,162 utterances across audio, visual, and textual modalities, along with word-level prosodic prominence annotations. The presence of prosodic labels in this dataset also makes it the first prosodically annotated African language dataset. We demonstrate the quality and utility of ACE through experiments using state-of-the-art emotion recognition methods, establishing solid baselines for future research. We hope ACE inspires further work on inclusive, linguistically and culturally diverse NLP resources.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Resources and Evaluation

Research Area Keywords: datasets for low resource languages; African languages and resources; emotion detection and analysis; low-resource languages; multimodality.

Contribution Types: Publicly available software and/or pre-trained models, Data resources, Data analysis

Languages Studied: Akan

Submission Number: 5041