# EmoTransCap: Dataset and Pipeline for Emotion Transition-Aware Speech Captioning in Discourses

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.26417 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26417/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [Gemma 3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19786/) (2025)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [emotion2vec: Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Speech Emotion Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.15185/) (2023)
- [Emotional Chatting Machine: Emotional Conversation Generation with Internal and External Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.01074/) (2017)
- [Seen and Unseen emotional style transfer for voice conversion with a new emotional speech dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.14794/) (2020)
- [Emotion Recognition in Conversation: Research Challenges, Datasets, and Recent Advances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02947/) (2019)
- [InstructTTS: Modelling Expressive TTS in Discrete Latent Space with Natural Language Style Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13662/) (2023)
- [TextrolSpeech: A Text Style Control Speech Corpus With Codec Language Text-to-Speech Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14430/) (2023)
- [PromptTTS 2: Describing and Generating Voices with Text Prompt](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02285/) (2023)
- [DialogBERT: Discourse-Aware Response Generation via Learning to Recover and Rank Utterances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.01775/) (2020)
- [SpeechCraft: A Fine-grained Expressive Speech Dataset with Natural Language Description](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13608/) (2024)
- [Speech Emotion Diarization: Which Emotion Appears When?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12991/) (2023)
- [AlignCap: Aligning Speech Emotion Captioning to Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19134/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Emotion perception and adaptive expression are fundamental capabilities in human-agent interaction. While recent advances in speech emotion captioning (SEC) have improved fine-grained emotional modeling, existing systems remain limited to static, single-emotion characterization within isolated sentences, neglecting dynamic emotional transitions at the discourse level. To address this gap, we propose Emotion Transition-Aware Speech Captioning (EmoTransCap), a paradigm that integrates temporal emotion dynamics with discourse-level speech description. To construct a dataset rich in emotion transitions while enabling scalable expansion, we design an automated pipeline for dataset creation. This is the first large-scale dataset explicitly designed to capture discourse-level emotion transitions. To generate semantically rich descriptions, we incorporate acoustic attributes and temporal cues from discourse-level speech. Our Multi-Task Emotion Transition Recognition (MTETR) model performs joint emotion transition detection and diarization. Leveraging the semantic analysis capabilities of LLMs, we produce two annotation versions: descriptive and instruction-oriented. These data and annotations offer a valuable resource for advancing emotion perception and emotional expressiveness. The dataset enables speech captions that capture emotional transitions, facilitating temporal-dynamic and fine-grained emotion understanding. We also introduce a controllable, transition-aware emotional speech synthesis system at the discourse level, enhancing anthropomorphic emotional expressiveness and supporting emotionally intelligent conversational agents.