# Joint Alignment of Multi-Task Feature and Label Spaces for Emotion Cause Pair Extraction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.04112 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04112/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction: A New Task to Emotion Analysis in Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01267/) (2019)
- [Aspect Level Sentiment Classification with Deep Memory Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08900/) (2016)
- [Cross-Lingual Semantic Role Labeling with High-Quality Translated Training Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06295/) (2020)
- [A Partition Filter Network for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12202/) (2021)
- [Learn from Syntax: Improving Pair-wise Aspect and Opinion Terms Extractionwith Rich Syntactic Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02520/) (2021)
- [Mastering the Explicit Opinion-role Interaction: Syntax-aided Neural Transition System for Unified Opinion Role Labeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02001/) (2021)
- [End-to-end Semantic Role Labeling with Neural Transition-based Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00394/) (2021)
- [Effective Token Graph Modeling using a Novel Labeling Strategy for Structured Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10796/) (2022)
- [A Question Answering Approach to Emotion Cause Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.05482/) (2017)
- [From Independent Prediction to Re-ordered Prediction: Integrating Relative Position and Global Label Information to Emotion Cause Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01230/) (2019)
- [Position Bias Mitigation: A Knowledge-Aware Graph Model for Emotion Cause Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03518/) (2021)
- [Personalized Hashtag Recommendation for Micro-videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09987/) (2019)
- [Multi-Granularity Semantic Aware Graph Model for Reducing Position Bias in Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02132/) (2022)
- [Detecting Concept-level Emotion Cause in Microblogging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08050/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Scene Graph as Pivoting: Inference-time Image-free Unsupervised Multimodal Machine Translation with Visual Scene Hallucination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12256/) (2023)
- [Cross2StrA: Unpaired Cross-lingual Image Captioning with Cross-lingual Cross-modal Structure-pivoted Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12260/) (2023)
- [Constructing Code-mixed Universal Dependency Forest for Unbiased Cross-lingual Relation Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12258/) (2023)
- [NUS-Emo at SemEval-2024 Task 3: Instruction-Tuning LLM for Multimodal Emotion-Cause Analysis in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.17261/) (2024)
- [ECQED: Emotion-Cause Quadruple Extraction in Dialogs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03969/) (2023)
- [TKDP: Threefold Knowledge-enriched Deep Prompt Tuning for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03974/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Conversation Discourse for Dialogue Disentanglement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03975/) (2023)
- [A Bi-directional Multi-hop Inference Model for Joint Dialog Sentiment Classification and Act Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04424/) (2023)
- [Span-level Emotion-Cause-Category Triplet Extraction with Instruction Tuning LLMs and Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12331/) (2025)
- [Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversations via Semantic Decoupling and Graph Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19547/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Emotion cause pair extraction (ECPE), as one of the derived subtasks of emotion cause analysis (ECA), shares rich inter-related features with emotion extraction (EE) and cause extraction (CE). Therefore EE and CE are frequently utilized as auxiliary tasks for better feature learning, modeled via multi-task learning (MTL) framework by prior works to achieve state-of-the-art (SoTA) ECPE results. However, existing MTL-based methods either fail to simultaneously model the specific features and the interactive feature in between, or suffer from the inconsistency of label prediction. In this work, we consider addressing the above challenges for improving ECPE by performing two alignment mechanisms with a novel A^2Net model. We first propose a feature-task alignment to explicitly model the specific emotion-&cause-specific features and the shared interactive feature. Besides, an inter-task alignment is implemented, in which the label distance between the ECPE and the combinations of EE&CE are learned to be narrowed for better label consistency. Evaluations of benchmarks show that our methods outperform current best-performing systems on all ECA subtasks. Further analysis proves the importance of our proposed alignment mechanisms for the task.