Global Context Is Not the Same as Affective Context
TL;DR for operators Conversation history helps emotion recognition, but this paper shows that having the whole conversation available is not the same as extracting the affective signal that persists across it. Using the same frozen RoBERTa utterance representations, a structured atmosphere prior scores 71.29 versus 67.86 on IEMOCAP and 69.22 versus 63.63 on MELD; it also improves EmoryNLP and DailyDialog. AtmosERC then reuses that prior inside a lightweight classifier, while a prompt-level variant converts it into a textual cue for LLMs. The lightweight model leads reported baselines on three of four datasets, and the LLM cue improves all three tested general-purpose LLMs on both evaluated datasets. ...