POP-CEE: Position-oriented Prompt-tuning Model for Causal Emotion Entailment

Abstract

The objective of the Causal Emotion Entailment (CEE) task is to identify the causes of the target emotional utterances in a given conversation. Most existing studies have focused on a fine-tuning paradigm based on a pretrained model, e.g., the BERT model. However, there are gaps between the pretrained task and the CEE task. Although a pretrained model enhances contextual comprehension to some extent, it cannot acquire specific knowledge that is relevant to the CEE task. In addition, in a typical CEE task, there are peculiarities in the distribution of the positions with different emotion types of emotion utterances and cause utterances in conversations. Existing methods employ a fixed-size window to capture the relationship between neighboring conversations; however, these methods ignore the specific semantic associations between emotions and cause utterances. To address these issues, we propose the Position-oriented Prompt-tuning (POP-CEE) model to solve the CEE task in an end-to-end manner. Specifically, we can model the CEE task by designing prompts with multiple unified goals and by exploring the positional relationship between emotion and cause utterances using a position constraint module. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed POP-CEE model achieves state-of-the-art performance on a benchmark dataset. Ourcode and data can be found at: https://github.com/Zh0uzh/POP-CEE.