Neutral Utterances are Also Causes: Enhancing Conversational Causal Emotion Entailment with Social Commonsense Knowledge

Neutral Utterances are Also Causes: Enhancing Conversational Causal Emotion Entailment with Social Commonsense Knowledge

Jiangnan Li, Fandong Meng, Zheng Lin, Rui Liu, Peng Fu, Yanan Cao, Weiping Wang, Jie Zhou

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 4209-4215. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/584

Conversational Causal Emotion Entailment aims to detect causal utterances for a non-neutral targeted utterance from a conversation. In this work, we build conversations as graphs to overcome implicit contextual modelling of the original entailment style. Following the previous work, we further introduce the emotion information into graphs. Emotion information can markedly promote the detection of causal utterances whose emotion is the same as the targeted utterance. However, it is still hard to detect causal utterances with different emotions, especially neutral ones. The reason is that models are limited in reasoning causal clues and passing them between utterances. To alleviate this problem, we introduce social commonsense knowledge (CSK) and propose a Knowledge Enhanced Conversation graph (KEC). KEC propagates the CSK between two utterances. As not all CSK is emotionally suitable for utterances, we therefore propose a sentiment-realized knowledge selecting strategy to filter CSK. To process KEC, we further construct the Knowledge Enhanced Directed Acyclic Graph networks. Experimental results show that our method outperforms baselines and infers more causes with different emotions from the targeted utterance.
Keywords:
Natural Language Processing: Sentiment Analysis and Text Mining
Natural Language Processing: Text Classification