The measurement of e$^{+}$e$^{-}$ pair production in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions is a unique tool to investigate the temperature of the quark-gluon plasma created in such colliding systems, to study the effect of the predicted chiral symmetry restoration and to investigate coherent photon-photon interactions in hadronic heavy-ion collisions. At low invariant mass, the dielectron production is sensitive to the properties of short-lived vector mesons in the medium related to chiral symmetry restoration. In the intermediate-mass region, the early temperature of the system can be extracted from the mass spectrum of its thermal black-body radiation. However, it is first necessary to understand the very large background of correlated dielectron pairs from semi-leptonic charm and beauty hadron decays. At very low pair transverse momenta, initial photon annihilation processes, triggered by the coherent electromagnetic fields of the incoming nuclei, are expected to play a role particularly in more peripheral collisions. The latest results on dielectron production in Pb--Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}$ = 5.02 TeV by the ALICE Collaboration are presented in this article.