Topic-based Multi-layer Knowledge Filtering for Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is a prominent research topic in natural language processing, widely applicable in various scenarios. However, accessing external commonsense knowledge and related dialogue topics, along with the complexity of fusing utterances, presents significant challenges. In this paper, we introduce a Topic-based Multilayer Knowledge Filtering (TMKF) model to enhance dialog emotion recognition accuracy. TMKF acquires commonsense knowledge for each utterance and employs two Variational Autoencoder (VAE) modules to extract global and speaker-level dialogue topics. We utilize Global Knowledge Filtering (GKF) and Local Knowledge Filtering (LKF) to obtain topic-specific knowledge representations after filtering commonsense information through global and local topic hierarchies. Subsequently, we leverage relational graphs to convolve commonsense knowledge with utterances, resulting in knowledge-constrained utterance representations for classification. Our proposed model is evaluated through extensive experiments on four widely used benchmark datasets for conversational emotion recognition. The results underscore the effectiveness of TMKF, which significantly outperforms other methods in standard metric evaluations.