XeroPol: Emotion-Aware Contrastive Learning for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Politeness Identification in Dialogues

Politeness is key to successful conversations. It depicts the behavior that is socially valued and is often accompanied by emotions. Previously, researchers have focused on detecting politeness in goal-oriented conversations in high-resource English language. The existing studies do not focus on identifying politeness in a resource-scared Indian languages such as Hindi, primarily due to the lack of labeled data. To overcome this limitation, in this article, we propose a novel emotion-aware contrastive learning (CL) method for zero-shot cross-lingual politeness identification (XeroPol) task in dialogues. We introduce ContrastiveAligner, a CL-based alignment method for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. ContrastiveAligner employs translated data and pushes the model to generate similar utterance embeddings for different languages. As politeness and emotion are interrelated, hence, as the conversation progresses, the variation in emotions tends to pose challenges in identifying politeness in dialogues. Thus, in this work, we also design an auxiliary emotion-aware CL objective using sentiment information, namely the EmoSenti objective, which is expected to implicitly model the emotion change across utterances and help in the primary task of politeness identification. Experiments on MultiDoGo and EmoWOZ datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the baselines. Further analysis such as human evaluation on the EmoInHindi dataset validates the efficacy of the entire approach.