EmoLASP: Emotion Recognition with Language Models and Answer Set Programming

Abstract:Emotion recognition in conversations is increasingly tackled with language models, but these models can be unstable and expensive to fine-tune or to prompt with long dialogue histories. We propose EmoLASP, a framework that combines a language model with declarative reasoning via Answer Set Programming (ASP) to predict VAD scores (Valence-Arousal-Dominance) in conversations. Experiments on a widely used benchmark dataset (IEMOCAP) across six open-source LLMs (3B-120B) and two PLMs (BERT, RoBERTa) show that EmoLASP improves prediction performance compared to using the language model alone, even when the LLMs/PLMs are given no dialogue history in their prompts or input vectors. The gains are largest for prompt-only LLMs, which EmoLASP uses without any fine-tuning. However, for fine-tuned PLMs, the reasoner adds little once dialogue history is available. EmoLASP's LLM pipeline demonstrates the potential advantages of using a reasoning approach to ensure emotion prediction consistency and to reduce both the cost of fine-tuning and the cost of prompting with long dialogue histories.

13 pages. Accepted to EMNLP 2026 Main Conference

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2608.29035 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2608.29035v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.29035 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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