A Unified Sequence Labeling Model for Emotion Cause Pair Extraction

Xinhong Chen, Qing Li, Jianping Wang


Abstract
Emotion-cause pair extraction (ECPE) aims at extracting emotions and causes as pairs from documents, where each pair contains an emotion clause and a set of cause clauses. Existing approaches address the task by first extracting emotion and cause clauses via two binary classifiers separately, and then training another binary classifier to pair them up. However, the extracted emotion-cause pairs of different emotion types cannot be distinguished from each other through simple binary classifiers, which limits the applicability of the existing approaches. Moreover, such two-step approaches may suffer from possible cascading errors. In this paper, to address the first problem, we assign emotion type labels to emotion and cause clauses so that emotion-cause pairs of different emotion types can be easily distinguished. As for the second problem, we reformulate the ECPE task as a unified sequence labeling task, which can extract multiple emotion-cause pairs in an end-to-end fashion. We propose an approach composed of a convolution neural network for encoding neighboring information and two Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory networks for two auxiliary tasks. Experiment results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approaches.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.18
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
208–218
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.18
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.18
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xinhong Chen, Qing Li, and Jianping Wang. 2020. A Unified Sequence Labeling Model for Emotion Cause Pair Extraction. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 208–218, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Unified Sequence Labeling Model for Emotion Cause Pair Extraction (Chen et al., COLING 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.18.pdf
Data
ECEXia and Ding, 2019