MELD: A multimodal multi-party dataset for emotion recognition in conversations

Abstract

Emotion recognition in conversations (ERC) is a challenging task that has recently gained popularity due to its potential applications. Until now, however, there has been no large-scale multimodal multi-party emotional conversational database containing more than two speakers per dialogue. To address this gap, we propose the Multimodal EmotionLines Dataset (MELD), an extension and enhancement of EmotionLines. MELD contains about 13,000 utterances from 1,433 dialogues from the TV-series Friends. Each utterance is annotated with emotion and sentiment labels, and encompasses audio, visual, and textual modalities. We propose several strong multimodal baselines and show the importance of contextual and multimodal information for emotion recognition in conversations. The full dataset is available for use at http://affective-meld.github.io.