Knowledge-Interactive Network with Sentiment Polarity Intensity-Aware Multi-Task Learning for Emotion Recognition in Conversations

Abstract

Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) has gained much attention from the NLP community recently. Some models concentrate on leveraging commonsense knowledge or multi-task learning to help complicated emotional reasoning. However, these models neglect direct utterance-knowledge interaction. In addition, these models utilize emotion-indirect auxiliary tasks, which provide limited affective information for the ERC task. To address the above issues, we propose a Knowledge-Interactive Network with sentiment polarity intensity-aware multi-task learning, namely KI-Net, which leverages both commonsense knowledge and sentiment lexicon to augment semantic information. Specifically, we use a self-matching module for internal utterance-knowledge interaction. Considering correlations with the ERC task, a phrase-level Sentiment Polarity Intensity Prediction (SPIP) task is devised as an auxiliary task. Experiments show that all knowledge integration, self-matching and SPIP modules improve the model performance respectively on three datasets. Moreover, our KI-Net model shows 1.04% performance improvement over the state-of-the-art model on the IEMOCAP dataset.