Recognizing emotions in spoken dialogue with acoustic and lexical cues

Emotions play a vital role in human communications. Therefore, it is desirable for virtual agent dialogue systems to recognize and react to user's emotions. However, current automatic emotion recognizers have limited performance compared to humans. Our work attempts to improve performance of recognizing emotions in spoken dialogue by identifying dialogue cues predictive of emotions, and by building multimodal recognition models with a knowledge-inspired hierarchy. We conduct experiments on both spontaneous and acted dialogue data to study the efficacy of the proposed approaches. Our results show that including prior knowledge on emotions in dialogue in either the feature representation or the model structure is beneficial for automatic emotion recognition.