Language models built from various sources are the foundation of today's NLP progress. However, for many low-resource languages, the diversity of domains is often limited -- more biased to a religious domain, which impacts their performance when evaluated on distant and rapidly evolving domains such as social media. Domain adaptive pre-training (DAPT) and task-adaptive pre-training (TAPT) are popular techniques to reduce this bias through continual pre-training for BERT-based models, but they have not been explored for African multilingual encoders. In this paper, we explore DAPT and TAPT continual pertaining approaches for the African languages social media domain. We introduce AfriSocial-a large-scale social media and news domain corpus for continual pre-training on several African languages. Leveraging AfriSocial, we show that DAPT consistently improves performance on three subjective tasks: sentiment analysis, multi-label emotion, and hate speech classification, covering 19 languages from 1% to 30% F1 score. Similarly, leveraging TAPT on one task data improves performance on other related tasks. For example, training with unlabeled sentiment data (source) for a fine-grained emotion classification task (target) improves the baseline results by an F1 score ranging from 0.55% to 15.11%. Combining these two methods (i.e. DAPT + TAPT) further improves the overall performance.
This paper presents the machine learning approach to the automated classification of a dog's emotional state based on the processing and recognition of audio signals. It offers helpful information for improving human-machine interfaces and developing more precise tools for classifying emotions from acoustic data. The presented model demonstrates an overall accuracy value above 70% for audio signals recorded for one dog.
The range of potential applications of acoustic analysis is wide. Classification of sounds, in particular, is a typical machine learning task that received a lot of attention in recent years. The most common approaches to sound classification are sub-symbolic, typically based on neural networks, and result in black-box models with high performances but very low transparency. In this work, we consider several audio tasks, namely, age and gender recognition, emotion classification, and respiratory disease diagnosis, and we approach them with a symbolic technique, that is, (modal) decision tree learning. We prove that such tasks can be solved using the same symbolic pipeline, that allows to extract simple rules with very high accuracy and low complexity. In principle, all such tasks could be associated to an autonomous conversation system, which could be useful in different contexts, such as an automatic reservation agent for an hospital or a clinic.
EEG emotion recognition faces significant hurdles due to noise interference, signal nonstationarity, and the inherent complexity of brain activity which make accurately emotion classification. In this study, we present the Fourier Adjacency Transformer, a novel framework that seamlessly integrates Fourier-based periodic analysis with graph-driven structural modeling. Our method first leverages novel Fourier-inspired modules to extract periodic features from embedded EEG signals, effectively decoupling them from aperiodic components. Subsequently, we employ an adjacency attention scheme to reinforce universal inter-channel correlation patterns, coupling these patterns with their sample-based counterparts. Empirical evaluations on SEED and DEAP datasets demonstrate that our method surpasses existing state-of-the-art techniques, achieving an improvement of approximately 6.5% in recognition accuracy. By unifying periodicity and structural insights, this framework offers a promising direction for future research in EEG emotion analysis.
This paper presents a novel approach for multi-label emotion detection, where Llama-3 is used to generate explanatory content that clarifies ambiguous emotional expressions, thereby enhancing RoBERTa's emotion classification performance. By incorporating explanatory context, our method improves F1-scores, particularly for emotions like fear, joy, and sadness, and outperforms text-only models. The addition of explanatory content helps resolve ambiguity, addresses challenges like overlapping emotional cues, and enhances multi-label classification, marking a significant advancement in emotion detection tasks.
Voice data is increasingly being used in modern digital communications, yet there is still a lack of comprehensive tools for automated voice analysis and characterization. To this end, we developed the VANPY (Voice Analysis in Python) framework for automated pre-processing, feature extraction, and classification of voice data. The VANPY is an open-source end-to-end comprehensive framework that was developed for the purpose of speaker characterization from voice data. The framework is designed with extensibility in mind, allowing for easy integration of new components and adaptation to various voice analysis applications. It currently incorporates over fifteen voice analysis components - including music/speech separation, voice activity detection, speaker embedding, vocal feature extraction, and various classification models. Four of the VANPY's components were developed in-house and integrated into the framework to extend its speaker characterization capabilities: gender classification, emotion classification, age regression, and height regression. The models demonstrate robust performance across various datasets, although not surpassing state-of-the-art performance. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate the framework's ability to extract speaker characteristics on a use-case challenge of analyzing character voices from the movie "Pulp Fiction." The results illustrate the framework's capability to extract multiple speaker characteristics, including gender, age, height, emotion type, and emotion intensity measured across three dimensions: arousal, dominance, and valence.
Arabic is one of the oldest languages still in use today. As a result, several Arabic-speaking regions have developed dialects that are unique to them. Dialect and emotion recognition have various uses in Arabic text analysis, such as determining an online customer's origin based on their comments. Furthermore, intelligent chatbots that are aware of a user's emotions can respond appropriately to the user. Current research in emotion detection in the Arabic language lacks awareness of how emotions are exhibited in different dialects, which motivates the work found in this study. This research addresses the problems of dialect and emotion classification in Arabic. Specifically, this is achieved by building a novel framework that can identify and predict Arabic dialects and emotions from a given text. The framework consists of three modules: A text-preprocessing module, a classification module, and a clustering module with the novel capability of building new dialect-aware emotion lexicons. The proposed framework generated a new emotional lexicon for different dialects. It achieved an accuracy of 88.9% in classifying Arabic dialects, which outperforms the state-of-the-art results by 6.45 percentage points. Furthermore, the framework achieved 89.1-79% accuracy in detecting emotions in the Egyptian and Gulf dialects, respectively.
Recently, emotional speech generation and speaker cloning have garnered significant interest in text-to-speech (TTS). With the open-sourcing of codec language TTS models trained on massive datasets with large-scale parameters, adapting these general pre-trained TTS models to generate speech with specific emotional expressions and target speaker characteristics has become a topic of great attention. Common approaches, such as full and adapter-based fine-tuning, often overlook the specific contributions of model parameters to emotion and speaker control. Treating all parameters uniformly during fine-tuning, especially when the target data has limited content diversity compared to the pre-training corpus, results in slow training speed and an increased risk of catastrophic forgetting. To address these challenges, we propose a characteristic-specific partial fine-tuning strategy, short as CSP-FT. First, we use a weighted-sum approach to analyze the contributions of different Transformer layers in a pre-trained codec language TTS model for emotion and speaker control in the generated speech. We then selectively fine-tune the layers with the highest and lowest characteristic-specific contributions to generate speech with target emotional expression and speaker identity. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves performance comparable to, or even surpassing, full fine-tuning in generating speech with specific emotional expressions and speaker identities. Additionally, CSP-FT delivers approximately 2x faster training speeds, fine-tunes only around 8% of parameters, and significantly reduces catastrophic forgetting. Furthermore, we show that codec language TTS models perform competitively with self-supervised models in speaker identification and emotion classification tasks, offering valuable insights for developing universal speech processing models.
Emotion recognition has a wide range of applications in human-computer interaction, marketing, healthcare, and other fields. In recent years, the development of deep learning technology has provided new methods for emotion recognition. Prior to this, many emotion recognition methods have been proposed, including multimodal emotion recognition methods, but these methods ignore the mutual interference between different input modalities and pay little attention to the directional dialogue between speakers. Therefore, this article proposes a new multimodal emotion recognition method, including a cross modal context fusion module, an adaptive graph convolutional encoding module, and an emotion classification module. The cross modal context module includes a cross modal alignment module and a context fusion module, which are used to reduce the noise introduced by mutual interference between different input modalities. The adaptive graph convolution module constructs a dialogue relationship graph for extracting dependencies and self dependencies between speakers. Our model has surpassed some state-of-the-art methods on publicly available benchmark datasets and achieved high recognition accuracy.
Memes have emerged as a powerful form of communication, integrating visual and textual elements to convey humor, satire, and cultural messages. Existing research has focused primarily on aspects such as emotion classification, meme generation, propagation, interpretation, figurative language, and sociolinguistics, but has often overlooked deeper meme comprehension and meme-text retrieval. To address these gaps, this study introduces ClassicMemes-50-templates (CM50), a large-scale dataset consisting of over 33,000 memes, centered around 50 popular meme templates. We also present an automated knowledge-grounded annotation pipeline leveraging large vision-language models to produce high-quality image captions, meme captions, and literary device labels overcoming the labor intensive demands of manual annotation. Additionally, we propose a meme-text retrieval CLIP model (mtrCLIP) that utilizes cross-modal embedding to enhance meme analysis, significantly improving retrieval performance. Our contributions include:(1) a novel dataset for large-scale meme study, (2) a scalable meme annotation framework, and (3) a fine-tuned CLIP for meme-text retrieval, all aimed at advancing the understanding and analysis of memes at scale.
Quantum machine learning (QML) offers a promising avenue for advancing representation learning in complex signal domains. In this study, we investigate the use of parameterised quantum circuits (PQCs) for speech emotion recognition (SER) a challenging task due to the subtle temporal variations and overlapping affective states in vocal signals. We propose a hybrid quantum classical architecture that integrates PQCs into a conventional convolutional neural network (CNN), leveraging quantum properties such as superposition and entanglement to enrich emotional feature representations. Experimental evaluations on three benchmark datasets IEMOCAP, RECOLA, and MSP-IMPROV demonstrate that our hybrid model achieves improved classification performance relative to a purely classical CNN baseline, with over 50% reduction in trainable parameters. This work provides early evidence of the potential for QML to enhance emotion recognition and lays the foundation for future quantum-enabled affective computing systems.
The SemEval-2024 Task 3 presents two subtasks focusing on emotion-cause pair extraction within conversational contexts. Subtask 1 revolves around the extraction of textual emotion-cause pairs, where causes are defined and annotated as textual spans within the conversation. Conversely, Subtask 2 extends the analysis to encompass multimodal cues, including language, audio, and vision, acknowledging instances where causes may not be exclusively represented in the textual data. Our proposed model for emotion-cause analysis is meticulously structured into three core segments: (i) embedding extraction, (ii) cause-pair extraction & emotion classification, and (iii) cause extraction using QA after finding pairs. Leveraging state-of-the-art techniques and fine-tuning on task-specific datasets, our model effectively unravels the intricate web of conversational dynamics and extracts subtle cues signifying causality in emotional expressions. Our team, AIMA, demonstrated strong performance in the SemEval-2024 Task 3 competition. We ranked as the 10th in subtask 1 and the 6th in subtask 2 out of 23 teams.
Cryptocurrency is a digital currency that uses blockchain technology with secure encryption. Due to the decentralization of these currencies, traditional monetary systems and the capital market of each they, can influence a society. Therefore, due to the importance of the issue, the need to understand public opinion and analyze people's opinions in this regard increases. To understand the opinions and views of people about different topics, you can take help from social networks because they are a rich source of opinions. The Twitter social network is one of the main platforms where users discuss various topics, therefore, in the shortest time and with the lowest cost, the opinion of the community can be measured on this social network. Twitter Sentiment Analysis (TSA) is a field that analyzes the sentiment expressed in tweets. Considering that most of TSA's research efforts on cryptocurrencies are focused on English language, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the opinions of Iranian users on the Twitter social network about cryptocurrencies and provide the best model for classifying tweets based on sentiment. In the case of automatic analysis of tweets, managers and officials in the field of economy can gain knowledge from the general public's point of view about this issue and use the information obtained in order to properly manage this phenomenon. For this purpose, in this paper, in order to build emotion classification models, natural language processing techniques such as bag of words (BOW) and FastText for text vectorization and classical machine learning algorithms including KNN, SVM and Adaboost learning methods Deep including LSTM and BERT model were used for classification, and finally BERT linguistic model had the best accuracy with 83.50%.
Mental health is a critical global public health issue, and psychological support hotlines play a pivotal role in providing mental health assistance and identifying suicide risks at an early stage. However, the emotional expressions conveyed during these calls remain underexplored in current research. This study introduces a method that combines pitch acoustic features with deep learning-based features to analyze and understand emotions expressed during hotline interactions. Using data from China's largest psychological support hotline, our method achieved an F1-score of 79.13% for negative binary emotion classification.Additionally, the proposed approach was validated on an open dataset for multi-class emotion classification,where it demonstrated better performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods. To explore its clinical relevance, we applied the model to analysis the frequency of negative emotions and the rate of emotional change in the conversation, comparing 46 subjects with suicidal behavior to those without. While the suicidal group exhibited more frequent emotional changes than the non-suicidal group, the difference was not statistically significant.Importantly, our findings suggest that emotional fluctuation intensity and frequency could serve as novel features for psychological assessment scales and suicide risk prediction.The proposed method provides valuable insights into emotional dynamics and has the potential to advance early intervention and improve suicide prevention strategies through integration with clinical tools and assessments The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/Sco-field/Speechemotionrecognition/tree/main.
Facial expressions play a crucial role in human communication serving as a powerful and impactful means to express a wide range of emotions. With advancements in artificial intelligence and computer vision, deep neural networks have emerged as effective tools for facial emotion recognition. In this paper, we propose EmoNeXt, a novel deep learning framework for facial expression recognition based on an adapted ConvNeXt architecture network. We integrate a Spatial Transformer Network (STN) to focus on feature-rich regions of the face and Squeeze-and-Excitation blocks to capture channel-wise dependencies. Moreover, we introduce a self-attention regularization term, encouraging the model to generate compact feature vectors. We demonstrate the superiority of our model over existing state-of-the-art deep learning models on the FER2013 dataset regarding emotion classification accuracy.
Large Language Models (LLMs) show promising learning and reasoning abilities. Compared to other NLP tasks, multilingual and multi-label emotion evaluation tasks are under-explored in LLMs. In this paper, we present EthioEmo, a multi-label emotion classification dataset for four Ethiopian languages, namely, Amharic (amh), Afan Oromo (orm), Somali (som), and Tigrinya (tir). We perform extensive experiments with an additional English multi-label emotion dataset from SemEval 2018 Task 1. Our evaluation includes encoder-only, encoder-decoder, and decoder-only language models. We compare zero and few-shot approaches of LLMs to fine-tuning smaller language models. The results show that accurate multi-label emotion classification is still insufficient even for high-resource languages such as English, and there is a large gap between the performance of high-resource and low-resource languages. The results also show varying performance levels depending on the language and model type. EthioEmo is available publicly to further improve the understanding of emotions in language models and how people convey emotions through various languages.
Emotion recognition is a critical component of affective computing. Training accurate machine learning models for emotion recognition typically requires a large amount of labeled data. Due to the subtleness and complexity of emotions, multiple evaluators are usually needed for each affective sample to obtain its ground-truth label, which is expensive. To save the labeling cost, this paper proposes an inconsistency-based active learning approach for cross-task transfer between emotion classification and estimation. Affective norms are utilized as prior knowledge to connect the label spaces of categorical and dimensional emotions. Then, the prediction inconsistency on the two tasks for the unlabeled samples is used to guide sample selection in active learning for the target task. Experiments on within-corpus and cross-corpus transfers demonstrated that cross-task inconsistency could be a very valuable metric in active learning. To our knowledge, this is the first work that utilizes prior knowledge on affective norms and data in a different task to facilitate active learning for a new task, even the two tasks are from different datasets.
Facial expression recognition has contributed significantly to various domains of life from healthcare and education to marketing and sales. This has led to extensive research in trying to improve recognition methods using deep learning. These methods aim to integrate advanced feature extraction techniques with enhanced classification accuracy. In this paper, a method for facial expression detection called (FerNeXt) was proposed which is based on the already existing ConvNeXt network architecture. An Efficient Channel Attention (ECA) block was introduced within the ConvNeXt architecture to enhance the model's attention to important channel features. Additionally, an Affinity loss function was incorporated to optimize class separability. The method was experimented on two large datasets: AffectNet and RAF-DB to show the proposed technique's capability. The results obtained show that the proposed model demonstrates good performance, consistently achieving higher accuracy and outperforming state of the art facial expression recognition approaches.
With strong expressive capabilities in Large Language Models(LLMs), generative models effectively capture sentiment structures and deep semantics, however, challenges remain in fine-grained sentiment classification across multi-lingual and complex contexts. To address this, we propose the Sentiment Cross-Lingual Recognition and Logic Framework (SentiXRL), which incorporates two modules,an emotion retrieval enhancement module to improve sentiment classification accuracy in complex contexts through historical dialogue and logical reasoning,and a self-circulating analysis negotiation mechanism (SANM)to facilitates autonomous decision-making within a single model for classification tasks.We have validated SentiXRL's superiority on multiple standard datasets, outperforming existing models on CPED and CH-SIMS,and achieving overall better performance on MELD,Emorynlp and IEMOCAP. Notably, we unified labels across several fine-grained sentiment annotation datasets and conducted category confusion experiments, revealing challenges and impacts of class imbalance in standard datasets.
Emotion recognition has significant potential in healthcare and affect-sensitive systems such as brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). However, challenges such as the high cost of labeled data and variability in electroencephalogram (EEG) signals across individuals limit the applicability of EEG-based emotion recognition models across domains. These challenges are exacerbated in cross-dataset scenarios due to differences in subject demographics, recording devices, and presented stimuli. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach to improve cross-domain EEG-based emotion classification. Our method, Gradual Proximity-guided Target Data Selection (GPTDS), incrementally selects reliable target domain samples for training. By evaluating their proximity to source clusters and the models confidence in predicting them, GPTDS minimizes negative transfer caused by noisy and diverse samples. Additionally, we introduce Prediction Confidence-aware Test-Time Augmentation (PC-TTA), a cost-effective augmentation technique. Unlike traditional TTA methods, which are computationally intensive, PC-TTA activates only when model confidence is low, improving inference performance while drastically reducing computational costs. Experiments on the DEAP and SEED datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach. When trained on DEAP and tested on SEED, our model achieves 67.44% accuracy, a 7.09% improvement over the baseline. Conversely, training on SEED and testing on DEAP yields 59.68% accuracy, a 6.07% improvement. Furthermore, PC-TTA reduces computational time by a factor of 15 compared to traditional TTA methods. Our method excels in detecting both positive and negative emotions, demonstrating its practical utility in healthcare applications. Code available at: https://github.com/RyersonMultimediaLab/EmotionRecognitionUDA