# Deep Emotion Recognition in Textual Conversations: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.09172 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09172/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 60 of its 177 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [XGBoost: A Scalable Tree Boosting System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02754/) (2016)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.00596/) (2019)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (2019)
- [Deep contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05365/) (2018)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [Graph Neural Networks: A Review of Methods and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.08434/) (2018)
- [Attention is not Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10186/) (2019)
- [DailyDialog: A Manually Labelled Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03957/) (2017)
- [MELD: A Multimodal Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02508/) (2018)
- [Attention is not not Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04626/) (2019)
- [Masked Label Prediction: Unified Message Passing Model for Semi-Supervised Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03509/) (2020)
- [GoEmotions: A Dataset of Fine-Grained Emotions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00547/) (2020)
- [Generalizing from a Few Examples: A Survey on Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05046/) (2019)
- [COMET: Commonsense Transformers for Automatic Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05317/) (2019)
- [DialogueRNN: An Attentive RNN for Emotion Detection in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00405/) (2018)
- [Advances in Pre-Training Distributed Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09405/) (2017)
- [DialogueGCN: A Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11540/) (2019)
- [COSMIC: COmmonSense knowledge for eMotion Identification in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02795/) (2020)
- [Emotion Recognition in Conversation: Research Challenges, Datasets, and Recent Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02947/) (2019)
- [Emotion Detection on TV Show Transcripts with Sequence-based Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04299/) (2017)
- [MMGCN: Multimodal Fusion via Deep Graph Convolution Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06779/) (2021)
- [Directed Acyclic Graph Network for Conversational Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12907/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Revisiting Disentanglement and Fusion on Modality and Context in Conversational Multimodal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04502/) (2023)
- [Context-Dependent Embedding Utterance Representations for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08216/) (2023)
- [How to Enhance Causal Discrimination of Utterances: A Case on Affective Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02615/) (2023)
- [ConText at WASSA 2024 Empathy and Personality Shared Task: History-Dependent Embedding Utterance Representations for Empathy and Emotion Prediction in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03818/) (2024)
- [JMI at SemEval 2024 Task 3: Two-step approach for multimodal ECAC using in-context learning with GPT and instruction-tuned Llama models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04798/) (2024)
- [Dialogue Agents 101: A Beginner's Guide to Critical Ingredients for Designing Effective Conversational Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07255/) (2023)
- [Fuzzy Fingerprinting Transformer Language-Models for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04292/) (2023)
- [Grounding Emotion Recognition with Visual Prototypes: VEGA -- Revisiting CLIP in MERC](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06564/) (2025)
- [Caring Without Feeling: Affective Dynamics as the Control Layer of Human-AI Agent Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.18259/) (2026)
- [Emotion Recognition in Multi-Speaker Conversations through Speaker Identification, Knowledge Distillation, and Hierarchical Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13731/) (2025)
- [A Customer Journey in the Land of Oz: Leveraging the Wizard of Oz Technique to Model Emotions in Customer Service Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21909/) (2025)
- [Fuzzy Fingerprinting Encoder Pre-trained Language Models for Emotion Recognition in Conversations: Human Assessment and Validity Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02665/) (2026)
- [Emotion Recognition in Sign Language Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23328/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) is a key step towards successful human-machine interaction. While the field has seen tremendous advancement in the last few years, new applications and implementation scenarios present novel challenges and opportunities. These range from leveraging the conversational context, speaker, and emotion dynamics modelling, to interpreting common sense expressions, informal language, and sarcasm, addressing challenges of real-time ERC, recognizing emotion causes, different taxonomies across datasets, multilingual ERC, and interpretability. This survey starts by introducing ERC, elaborating on the challenges and opportunities of this task. It proceeds with a description of the emotion taxonomies and a variety of ERC benchmark datasets employing such taxonomies. This is followed by descriptions comparing the most prominent works in ERC with explanations of the neural architectures employed. Then, it provides advisable ERC practices towards better frameworks, elaborating on methods to deal with subjectivity in annotations and modelling and methods to deal with the typically unbalanced ERC datasets. Finally, it presents systematic review tables comparing several works regarding the methods used and their performance. Benchmarking these works highlights resorting to pre-trained Transformer Language Models to extract utterance representations, using Gated and Graph Neural Networks to model the interactions between these utterances, and leveraging Generative Large Language Models to tackle ERC within a generative framework. This survey emphasizes the advantage of leveraging techniques to address unbalanced data, the exploration of mixed emotions, and the benefits of incorporating annotation subjectivity in the learning phase.