From Chatter to Matter: Addressing Critical Steps of Emotion Recognition
  Learning in Task-oriented Dialogue
Shutong Feng Nurul Lubis Benjamin Ruppik Christian Geishauser Michael Heck Hsien-chin Lin Carel van Niekerk Renato Vukovic Milica Gašić
Emotion recognition in conversations (ERC) is a crucial task for building
human-like conversational agents. While substantial efforts have been devoted
to ERC for chit-chat dialogues, the task-oriented counterpart is largely left
unattended. Directly applying chit-chat ERC models to task-oriented dialogues
(ToDs) results in suboptimal performance as these models overlook key features
such as the correlation between emotions and task completion in ToDs. In this
paper, we propose a framework that turns a chit-chat ERC model into a
task-oriented one, addressing three critical aspects: data, features and
objective. First, we devise two ways of augmenting rare emotions to improve ERC
performance. Second, we use dialogue states as auxiliary features to
incorporate key information from the goal of the user. Lastly, we leverage a
multi-aspect emotion definition in ToDs to devise a multi-task learning
objective and a novel emotion-distance weighted loss function. Our framework
yields significant improvements for a range of chit-chat ERC models on EmoWOZ,
a large-scale dataset for user emotion in ToDs. We further investigate the
generalisability of the best resulting model to predict user satisfaction in
different ToD datasets. A comparison with supervised baselines shows a strong
zero-shot capability, highlighting the potential usage of our framework in
wider scenarios.