Conditional Causal Relationships between Emotions and Causes in Texts

Xinhong Chen, Qing Li, Jianping Wang


Abstract
The causal relationships between emotions and causes in text have recently received a lot of attention. Most of the existing works focus on the extraction of the causally related clauses from documents. However, none of these works has considered the possibility that the causal relationships among the extracted emotion and cause clauses may only be valid under a specific context, without which the extracted clauses may not be causally related. To address such an issue, we propose a new task of determining whether or not an input pair of emotion and cause has a valid causal relationship under different contexts, and construct a corresponding dataset via manual annotation and negative sampling based on an existing benchmark dataset. Furthermore, we propose a prediction aggregation module with low computational overhead to fine-tune the prediction results based on the characteristics of the input clauses. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our aggregation module.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.252
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3111–3121
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.252
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.252
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xinhong Chen, Qing Li, and Jianping Wang. 2020. Conditional Causal Relationships between Emotions and Causes in Texts. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 3111–3121, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Conditional Causal Relationships between Emotions and Causes in Texts (Chen et al., EMNLP 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.252.pdf
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 2020.emnlp-main.252.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip
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