Why We Feel What We Feel: Joint Detection of Emotions and Their Opinion Triggers in E-commerce

Arnav Attri, Anuj Attri, Suman Banerjee, Amey Patil, Muthusamy Chelliah, Nikesh Garera, Pushpak Bhattacharyya


Abstract
Customer reviews on e-commerce platforms capture critical affective signals that drive purchasing decisions. However, no existing research has explored the joint task of emotion detection and explanatory span identification in e-commerce reviews - a crucial gap in understanding what triggers customer emotional responses. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel joint task unifying Emotion detection and Opinion Trigger extraction (EOT), which explicitly models the relationship between causal text spans (opinion triggers) and affective dimensions (emotion categories) grounded in Plutchik’s theory of 8 primary emotions.In the absence of labeled data, we introduce EOT-X, a human-annotated collection of 2,400 reviews with fine-grained emotions and opinion triggers. We evaluate 23 Large Language Models (LLMs) and present EOT-DETECT, a structured prompting framework with systematic reasoning and self-reflection. Our framework surpasses zero-shot and chain-of-thought techniques, across e-commerce domains.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.295
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5515–5532
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.295/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Arnav Attri, Anuj Attri, Suman Banerjee, Amey Patil, Muthusamy Chelliah, Nikesh Garera, and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2025. Why We Feel What We Feel: Joint Detection of Emotions and Their Opinion Triggers in E-commerce. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 5515–5532, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Why We Feel What We Feel: Joint Detection of Emotions and Their Opinion Triggers in E-commerce (Attri et al., Findings 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.295.pdf
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