EMO-Reasoning: Benchmarking Emotional Reasoning Capabilities in Spoken Dialogue Systems
This work addresses the problem of improving emotion-aware interactions in spoken dialogue systems for users, though it is incremental as it focuses on benchmarking rather than novel modeling.
The authors tackled the lack of a holistic evaluation system for emotional reasoning in spoken dialogue systems by introducing EMO-Reasoning, a benchmark that assesses emotional coherence using a curated dataset and a Cross-turn Emotion Reasoning Score, effectively detecting emotional inconsistencies in seven evaluated systems.
Speech emotions play a crucial role in human-computer interaction, shaping engagement and context-aware communication. Despite recent advances in spoken dialogue systems, a holistic system for evaluating emotional reasoning is still lacking. To address this, we introduce EMO-Reasoning, a benchmark for assessing emotional coherence in dialogue systems. It leverages a curated dataset generated via text-to-speech to simulate diverse emotional states, overcoming the scarcity of emotional speech data. We further propose the Cross-turn Emotion Reasoning Score to assess the emotion transitions in multi-turn dialogues. Evaluating seven dialogue systems through continuous, categorical, and perceptual metrics, we show that our framework effectively detects emotional inconsistencies, providing insights for improving current dialogue systems. By releasing a systematic evaluation benchmark, we aim to advance emotion-aware spoken dialogue modeling toward more natural and adaptive interactions.