Towards responsive Sensitive Artificial Listeners

This paper describes work in the recently started project SEMAINE, which aims to build a set of Sensitive Artificial Listeners – conversational agents designed to sustain an interaction with a human user despite limited verbal skills, through robust recognition and generation of non-verbal behaviour in real-time, both when the agent is speaking and listening. We report on data collection and on the design of a system architecture in view of real-time responsiveness

On the Development of Adaptive and User-Centred Interactive Multimodal Interfaces

Multimodal systems have attained increased attention in recent years, which has made possible important improvements in the technologies for recognition, processing, and generation of multimodal information. However, there are still many issues related to multimodality which are not clear, for example, the principles that make it possible to resemble human-human multimodal communication. This chapter focuses on some of the most important challenges that researchers have recently envisioned for future multimodal interfaces. It also describes current efforts to develop intelligent, adaptive, proactive, portable and affective multimodal interfaces

Refashioning Emotion Recognition Modelling: The Advent of Generalised Large Models

After the inception of emotion recognition or affective computing, it has increasingly become an active research topic due to its broad applications. Over the past couple of decades, emotion recognition models have gradually migrated from statistically shallow models to neural network-based deep models, which can significantly boost the performance of emotion recognition models and consistently achieve the best results on different benchmarks. Therefore, in recent years, deep models have always been considered the first option for emotion recognition. However, the debut of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, has remarkably astonished the world due to their emerged capabilities of zero/few-shot learning, in-context learning, chain-of-thought, and others that are never shown in previous deep models. In the present paper, we comprehensively investigate how the LLMs perform in emotion recognition in terms of diverse aspects, including in-context learning, few-short learning, accuracy, generalisation, and explanation. Moreover, we offer some insights and pose other potential challenges, hoping to ignite broader discussions about enhancing emotion recognition in the new era of advanced and generalised large models

深層学習に基づく感情会話分析に関する研究

Owning the capability to express specific emotions by a chatbot during a conversation is one of the key parts of artificial intelligence, which has an intuitive and quantifiable impact on the improvement of chatbot’s usability and user satisfaction. Enabling machines to emotion recognition in conversation is challenging, mainly because the information in human dialogue innately conveys emotions by long-term experience, abundant knowledge, context, and the intricate patterns between the affective states. Recently, many studies on neural emotional conversational models have been conducted. However, enabling the chatbot to control what kind of emotion to respond to upon its own characters in conversation is still underexplored. At this stage, people are no longer satisfied with using a dialogue system to solve specific tasks, and are more eager to achieve spiritual communication. In the chat process, if the robot can perceive the user's emotions and can accurately process them, it can greatly enrich the content of the dialogue and make the user empathize. In the process of emotional dialogue, our ultimate goal is to make the machine understand human emotions and give matching responses. Based on these two points, this thesis explores and in-depth emotion recognition in conversation task and emotional dialogue generation task. In the past few years, although considerable progress has been made in emotional research in dialogue, there are still some difficulties and challenges due to the complex nature of human emotions. The key contributions in this thesis are summarized as below: (1) Researchers have paid more attention to enhancing natural language models with knowledge graphs these days, since knowledge graph has gained a lot of systematic knowledge. A large number of studies had shown that the introduction of external commonsense knowledge is very helpful to improve the characteristic information. We address the task of emotion recognition in conversations using external knowledge to enhance semantics. In this work, we employ an external knowledge graph ATOMIC to extract the knowledge sources. We proposed KES model, a new framework that incorporates different elements of external knowledge and conversational semantic role labeling, where build upon them to learn interactions between interlocutors participating in a conversation. The conversation is a sequence of coherent and orderly discourses. For neural networks, the capture of long-range context information is a weakness. We adopt Transformer a structure composed of self-attention and feed forward neural network, instead of the traditional RNN model, aiming at capturing remote context information. We design a self-attention layer specialized for enhanced semantic text features with external commonsense knowledge. Then, two different networks composed of LSTM are responsible for tracking individual internal state and context external state. In addition, the proposed model has experimented on three datasets in emotion detection in conversation. The experimental results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on most of the tested datasets. (2) We proposed an emotional dialogue model based on Seq2Seq, which is improved from three aspects: model input, encoder structure, and decoder structure, so that the model can generate responses with rich emotions, diversity, and context. In terms of model input, emotional information and location information are added based on word vectors. In terms of the encoder, the proposed model first encodes the current input and sentence sentiment to generate a semantic vector, and additionally encodes the context and sentence sentiment to generate a context vector, adding contextual information while ensuring the independence of the current input. On the decoder side, attention is used to calculate the weights of the two semantic vectors separately and then decode, to fully integrate the local emotional semantic information and the global emotional semantic information. We used seven objective evaluation indicators to evaluate the model's generation results, context similarity, response diversity, and emotional response. Experimental results show that the model can generate diverse responses with rich sentiment, contextual associations