Recognizing Conditional Causal Relationships about Emotions and Their Corresponding Conditions

Abstract

Recent studies have extensively explored the causal connections between emotions and their underlying causes in textual data. Most research aims to identify clauses within documents that are causally related. However, these studies have overlooked the fact that such causal relationships are often context-dependent and valid only within specific contextual clauses. To bridge this gap, we present a novel task of determining the presence of a valid causal relationship between a given pair of emotion and cause clauses in different contexts, while also identifying the specific contextual clauses involved. Since this task is novel and lacks an existing dataset for testing, we manually annotate a benchmark dataset to obtain labels for our task and classify the types of context clauses, which can also be beneficial for other applications. By leveraging negative sampling, we create a balanced final dataset that includes documents with and without causal relationships. Building upon this dataset, we propose an end-to-end multi-task framework that incorporates two innovative modules aimed at achieving the objectives of our task. We introduce a context masking module to identify the contextual clauses that contribute to causal relationships and a prediction aggregation module to refine predictions by determining the reliance of emotion and cause clauses on specific contextual clauses. Extensive comparative experiments and ablation studies validate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed framework. The annotated dataset provides a novel way for exploring complex reasoning in causal analysis.