A Multibias-Mitigated and Sentiment Knowledge Enriched Transformer for Debiasing in Multimodal Conversational Emotion Recognition

Multimodal emotion recognition in conversations (mERC) is an active research topic in natural language processing (NLP), which aims to predict human’s emotional states in communications of multiple modalities, e,g., natural language and facial gestures. Innumerable implicit prejudices and preconceptions fill human language and conversations, leading to the question of whether the current data-driven mERC approaches produce a biased error. For example, such approaches may offer higher emotional scores on the utterances by females than males. In addition, the existing debias models mainly focus on gender or race, where multibias mitigation is still an unexplored task in mERC. In this work, we take the first step to solve these issues by proposing a series of approaches to mitigate five typical kinds of bias in textual utterances (i.e., gender, age, race, religion and LGBTQ+) and visual representations (i.e., gender and age), followed by a Multibias-Mitigated and sentiment Knowledge Enriched bi-modal Transformer (MMKET). Comprehensive experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed model and prove that the debias operation has a great impact on the classification performance for mERC. We hope our study will benefit the development of bias mitigation in mERC and related emotion studies.