# EmotionDialogCN: A Spontaneous Multimodal Dataset for Mandarin Emotional Dialogue

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.20905 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.20905/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [A Lip Sync Expert Is All You Need for Speech to Lip Generation In The Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.10010/) (2020)
- [MELD: A Multimodal Multi-Party Dataset for Emotion Recognition in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02508/) (2018)
- [Capture, Learning, and Synthesis of 3D Speaking Styles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03079/) (2019)
- [CelebV-HQ: A Large-Scale Video Facial Attributes Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12393/) (2022)
- [FaceFormer: Speech-Driven 3D Facial Animation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05329/) (2021)
- [EmoTalk: Speech-Driven Emotional Disentanglement for 3D Face Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11089/) (2023)
- [Learning to Listen: Modeling Non-Deterministic Dyadic Facial Motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08451/) (2022)
- [From Audio to Photoreal Embodiment: Synthesizing Humans in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.01885/) (2024)
- [SelfTalk: A Self-Supervised Commutative Training Diagram to Comprehend 3D Talking Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.10799/) (2023)
- [Responsive Listening Head Generation: A Benchmark Dataset and Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13548/) (2021)
- [Let's Go Real Talk: Spoken Dialogue Model for Face-to-Face Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07867/) (2024)
- [INFP: Audio-Driven Interactive Head Generation in Dyadic Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04037/) (2024)
- [Affective Faces for Goal-Driven Dyadic Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10939/) (2023)
- [OpenViDial: A Large-Scale, Open-Domain Dialogue Dataset with Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15015/) (2020)
- [MERBench: A Unified Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03429/) (2024)
- [OpenViDial 2.0: A Larger-Scale, Open-Domain Dialogue Generation Dataset with Visual Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12761/) (2021)
- [REACT 2024: the Second Multiple Appropriate Facial Reaction Generation Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05166/) (2024)
- [Cafe-Talk: Generating 3D Talking Face Animation with Multimodal Coarse- and Fine-grained Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14517/) (2025)
- [EmotionTalk: An Interactive Chinese Multimodal Emotion Dataset With Rich Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23018/) (2025)
- [How Video Meetings Change Your Expression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00955/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Face-to-face audiovisual interaction is central to human communication, conveying rich emotional and social cues. However, existing multimodal dialogue datasets remain limited by inadequate emotion annotations, poor emotional diversity, and small scale. We introduce EmotionDialogCN, a large-scale audiovisual-emotional dataset designed to capture authentic face-to-face communication. It contains 21,880 dialogue sessions performed by 119 professional actors across 20 everyday scenarios, covering 18 emotion categories with over 400 hours of recordings, the largest and most comprehensive dataset of its kind. A novel data collection framework minimizes equipment interference, enabling natural and nuanced emotional expressions. EmotionDialogCN achieves an emotion distribution deviation of 0.64 from real human emotion statistics (versus 5.65 for prior datasets) and consistent subject framing (52-59% frame occupancy). Together, these properties translate into stable unimodal and multimodal performance across acoustic, lexical, and visual modalities, with fusion results further underscoring strong multimodal alignment and cross-modal complementarity.