Dual Learning for Conversational Emotion Recognition and Emotional Response Generation

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) and emotional response generation (ERG) are two important NLP tasks. ERC aims to detect the utterance-level emotion from a dialogue, while ERG focuses on expressing a desired emotion. Essentially, ERC is a classification task, with its input and output domains being the utterance text and emotion labels, respectively. On the other hand, ERG is a generation task with its input and output domains being the opposite. These two tasks are highly related, but surprisingly, they are addressed independently without making use of their duality in prior works. Therefore, in this article, we propose to solve these two tasks in a dual learning framework. Our contributions are fourfold: (1) We propose a dual learning framework for ERC and ERG. (2) Within the proposed framework, two models can be trained jointly, so that the duality between them can be utilised. (3) Instead of a symmetric framework that deals with two tasks of the same data domain, we propose a dual learning framework that performs on a pair of asymmetric input and output spaces, i.e., the natural language space and the emotion labels. (4) Experiments are conducted on benchmark datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.