COMMA-DEER: COmmon-sense Aware Multimodal Multitask Approach for Detection of Emotion and Emotional Reasoning in Conversations

Mental health is a critical component of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly Goal 3, which aims to provide “good health and well-being”. The present mental health treatment gap is exacerbated by stigma, lack of human resources, and lack of research capability for implementation and policy reform. We present and discuss a novel task of detecting emotional reasoning (ER) and accompanying emotions in conversations. In particular, we create a first-of-its-kind multimodal mental health conversational corpus that is manually annotated at the utterance level with emotional reasoning and related emotion. We develop a multimodal multitask framework with a novel multimodal feature fusion technique and a contextuality learning module to handle the two tasks. Leveraging multimodal sources of information, commonsense reasoning, and through a multitask framework, our proposed model produces strong results. We achieve performance gains of 6% accuracy and 4.62% F1 on the emotion detection task and 3.56% accuracy and 3.31% F1 on the ER detection task, when compared to the existing state-of-the-art model.