Adeline Nyamathi

Cheonkam Jeong, Jessica Liao, Audrey Lu et al.

We present DementiaBank-Emotion, the first multi-rater emotion annotation corpus for Alzheimer's disease (AD) speech. Annotating 1,492 utterances from 108 speakers for Ekman's six basic emotions and neutral, we find that AD patients express significantly more non-neutral emotions (16.9%) than healthy controls (5.7%; p < .001). Exploratory acoustic analysis suggests a possible dissociation: control speakers showed substantial F0 modulation for sadness (Delta = -3.45 semitones from baseline), whereas AD speakers showed minimal change (Delta = +0.11 semitones; interaction p = .023), though this finding is based on limited samples (sadness: n=5 control, n=15 AD) and requires replication. Within AD speech, loudness differentiates emotion categories, indicating partially preserved emotion-prosody mappings. We release the corpus, annotation guidelines, and calibration workshop materials to support research on emotion recognition in clinical populations.

Cheonkam Jeong, Adeline Nyamathi

Despite strong recent progress in Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC), two gaps remain: we lack clear understanding of which modeling choices materially affect performance, and we have limited linguistic analysis linking recognition findings to actionable generation cues. We address both via a systematic study on IEMOCAP. For recognition, we conduct controlled ablations with 10 random seeds and paired tests (with correction for multiple comparisons), yielding three findings. First, conversational context is dominant: performance saturates quickly, with roughly 90% of gain achieved using only the most recent 10-30 preceding turns. Second, hierarchical sentence representations improve utterance-only recognition (K=0), but the benefit vanishes once turn-level context is available, suggesting conversational history subsumes intra-utterance structure. Third, external affective lexicon (SenticNet) integration does not improve results, consistent with pretrained encoders already capturing affective signal. Under strictly causal (past-only) setting, our simple models attain strong performance (82.69% 4-way; 67.07% 6-way weighted F1). For linguistic analysis, we examine 5,286 discourse-marker occurrences and find reliable association between emotion and marker position (p < 0.0001). Sad utterances show reduced left-periphery marker usage (21.9%) relative to other emotions (28-32%), aligning with accounts linking left-periphery markers to active discourse management. This pattern is consistent with Sad benefiting most from conversational context (+22%p), suggesting sadness relies more on discourse history than overt pragmatic signaling.