Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction as Question Answering

Abstract

The task of Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction (ECPE) aims to extract all potential emotion-cause pairs of a document without any annotation of emotion or cause clauses. Previous approaches on ECPE have tried to improve conventional two-step processing schemes by using complex architectures for modeling emotioncause interaction. In this paper, we cast the ECPE task to the question answering (QA) problem and propose simple yet effective BERT-based solutions to tackle it. Given a document, our Guided-QA model first predicts the best emotion clause using a fixed question. Then the predicted emotion is used as a question to predict the most potential cause for the emotion. We evaluate our model on a standard ECPE corpus. The experimental results show that despite its simplicity, our Guided-QA achieves promising results and is easy to reproduce. The code of Guided-QA is also provided.