# Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversations via Semantic Decoupling and Graph Alignment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19547 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19547/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [DailyDialog: A Manually Labelled Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03957/) (2017)
- [DialogueRNN: An Attentive RNN for Emotion Detection in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00405/) (2018)
- [DialogueGCN: A Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11540/) (2019)
- [Towards Deep Conversational Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07617/) (2018)
- [Scalable Gromov-Wasserstein Learning for Graph Partitioning and Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07645/) (2019)
- [MMGCN: Multimodal Fusion via Deep Graph Convolution Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06779/) (2021)
- [Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction: A New Task to Emotion Analysis in Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.01267/) (2019)
- [Recognizing Emotion Cause in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.11820/) (2020)
- [GOT: An Optimal Transport framework for Graph comparison](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02085/) (2019)
- [Towards Persona-Based Empathetic Conversational Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12316/) (2020)
- [Multimodal Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.08020/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Multi-Marginal Optimal Transport for Network Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04470/) (2023)
- [A Fused Gromov-Wasserstein Framework for Unsupervised Knowledge Graph Entity Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06574/) (2023)
- [Joint Alignment of Multi-Task Feature and Label Spaces for Emotion Cause Pair Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04112/) (2022)
- [Ada2I: Enhancing Modality Balance for Multimodal Conversational Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.12895/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversations (ECPEC) aims to identify the set of causal relations between emotion utterances and their triggering causes within a dialogue. Most existing approaches formulate ECPEC as an independent pairwise classification task, overlooking the distinct semantics of emotion diffusion and cause explanation, and failing to capture globally consistent many-to-many conversational causality. To address these limitations, we revisit ECPEC from a semantic perspective and seek to disentangle emotion-oriented semantics from cause-oriented semantics, mapping them into two complementary representation spaces to better capture their distinct conversational roles. Building on this semantic decoupling, we naturally formulate ECPEC as a global alignment problem between the emotion-side and cause-side representations, and employ optimal transport to enable many-to-many and globally consistent emotion-cause matching. Based on this perspective, we propose a unified framework SCALE that instantiates the above semantic decoupling and alignment principle within a shared conversational structure. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that SCALE consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our codes are released at https://github.com/CoCoSphere/SCALE.