When to Call an LLM: A Confidence-Gated Hybrid for Cost-Effective Emotion Recognition in Conversational AI

arXiv cs.AISeptember 17, 2026en

arXiv:2609.17977v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is a production capability behind agent-assist prompts, escalation routing, and post-call analytics in contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS) platforms, where cost and latency constraints matter as much as accuracy. We report a systems-level comparison of three deployment options for dialogue-contextual ERC: a low-cost stacked ensemble (sentence embeddings, windowed context, RandomForest/XGBoost/logistic-regression stacking), off-the-shelf LLM prompting (GPT-4o-mini; zero-shot, few-shot, chain-of-thought), and a confidence-gated hybrid that escalates only the ensemble's least-confident predictions to the L

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