PEMV: Improving Spatial Distribution for Emotion Recognition in Conversations Using Proximal Emotion Mean Vectors

Abstract

Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) aims to identify the emotions expressed in each utterance within a dialogue. Existing research primarily focuses on the analysis of contextual structure in dialogue and the interactions between different emotions. Nonetheless, ERC datasets often contain difficult-to-classify samples and suffer from imbalanced label distributions, which pose challenges to the spatial distribution of dialogue features. To tackle this issue, we propose a method that generates Proximal Emotion Mean Vectors (PEMV) based on emotion feature queues to optimize the spatial representation of text features. We design a Center Loss based on PEMVs to pull hard-to-classify samples closer to their respective category centers and employ Angle Loss to maximize the angular separation between different PEMVs. Furthermore, we utilize PEMV as a classifier to better adapt to the spatial structure of dialogue features. Extensive experiments on three widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and validates its effectiveness in optimizing feature space representations.