# Recognizing Emotion Cause in Conversations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.11820 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11820/

## Key facts

- Cited by 66 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 66)

- [Improving Multi-turn Emotional Support Dialogue Generation with Lookahead Strategy Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04242/) (2022)
- [Is ChatGPT Equipped with Emotional Dialogue Capabilities?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09582/) (2023)
- [Towards Interpretable Mental Health Analysis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03347/) (2023)
- [EmoBench: Evaluating the Emotional Intelligence of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12071/) (2024)
- [Perspective-taking and Pragmatics for Generating Empathetic Responses Focused on Emotion Causes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08828/) (2021)
- [Multimodal Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08020/) (2021)
- [EmoWOZ: A Large-Scale Corpus and Labelling Scheme for Emotion Recognition in Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.04919/) (2021)
- [Position Bias Mitigation: A Knowledge-Aware Graph Model for Emotion Cause Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03518/) (2021)
- [Towards an Online Empathetic Chatbot with Emotion Causes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.11903/) (2021)
- [Knowledge-Bridged Causal Interaction Network for Causal Emotion Entailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02995/) (2022)
- [Empathetic Conversational Systems: A Review of Current Advances, Gaps, and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05017/) (2022)
- [Joyful: Joint Modality Fusion and Graph Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11009/) (2023)
- [Neutral Utterances are Also Causes: Enhancing Conversational Causal Emotion Entailment with Social Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.00759/) (2022)
- [Deep Emotion Recognition in Textual Conversations: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09172/) (2022)
- [SemEval-2024 Task 3: Multimodal Emotion Cause Analysis in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13049/) (2024)
- [The Illusion of Empathy: How AI Chatbots Shape Conversation Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12877/) (2024)
- [FETA: A Benchmark for Few-Sample Task Transfer in Open-Domain Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06262/) (2022)
- [Both Matter: Enhancing the Emotional Intelligence of Large Language Models without Compromising the General Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10073/) (2024)
- [BiosERC: Integrating Biography Speakers Supported by LLMs for ERC Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04279/) (2024)
- [The Imperative of Conversation Analysis in the Era of LLMs: A Survey of Tasks, Techniques, and Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14195/) (2024)
- [Less is More: Mitigate Spurious Correlations for Open-Domain Dialogue Response Generation Models by Causal Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01962/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models for Subjective Language Understanding: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.07959/) (2025)
- [Multi-Task Learning and Adapted Knowledge Models for Emotion-Cause Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09790/) (2021)
- [Rational Sensibility: LLM Enhanced Empathetic Response Generation Guided by Self-presentation Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08702/) (2023)
- [Just a Scratch: Enhancing LLM Capabilities for Self-harm Detection through Intent Differentiation and Emoji Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05073/) (2025)
- [TSAM: A Two-Stream Attention Model for Causal Emotion Entailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00819/) (2022)
- [NaRLE: Natural Language Models using Reinforcement Learning with Emotion Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02148/) (2021)
- [Wish I Can Feel What You Feel: A Neural Approach for Empathetic Response Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02000/) (2022)
- [SemEval 2024 -- Task 10: Emotion Discovery and Reasoning its Flip in Conversation (EDiReF)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18944/) (2024)
- [NUS-Emo at SemEval-2024 Task 3: Instruction-Tuning LLM for Multimodal Emotion-Cause Analysis in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17261/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We address the problem of recognizing emotion cause in conversations, define two novel sub-tasks of this problem, and provide a corresponding dialogue-level dataset, along with strong Transformer-based baselines. The dataset is available at https://github.com/declare-lab/RECCON. Introduction: Recognizing the cause behind emotions in text is a fundamental yet under-explored area of research in NLP. Advances in this area hold the potential to improve interpretability and performance in affect-based models. Identifying emotion causes at the utterance level in conversations is particularly challenging due to the intermingling dynamics among the interlocutors. Method: We introduce the task of Recognizing Emotion Cause in CONversations with an accompanying dataset named RECCON, containing over 1,000 dialogues and 10,000 utterance cause-effect pairs. Furthermore, we define different cause types based on the source of the causes, and establish strong Transformer-based baselines to address two different sub-tasks on this dataset: causal span extraction and causal emotion entailment. Result: Our Transformer-based baselines, which leverage contextual pre-trained embeddings, such as RoBERTa, outperform the state-of-the-art emotion cause extraction approaches Conclusion: We introduce a new task highly relevant for (explainable) emotion-aware artificial intelligence: recognizing emotion cause in conversations, provide a new highly challenging publicly available dialogue-level dataset for this task, and give strong baseline results on this dataset.