MPEG: A Multi-Perspective Enhanced Graph Attention Network for Causal Emotion Entailment in Conversations

Emotion causes constitute a pivotal component in the comprehension of emotional conversations. Recently, a new task named Causal Emotion Entailment (CEE) has been proposed to identify the causal utterances for the target emotional utterance in a conversation. Although researchers have achieved some progress in solving this problem, they failed to adequately incorporate speaker characteristics and overlooked the effects of temporal relations in conversation structures. To fill such a research gap to some extent, we propose a novel causal emotion entailment framework, namely MPEG (Multi-Perspective Enhanced Graph attention network). The training of MPEG consists of three stages. Firstly, we utilize a speaker-aware pre-trained model and two attention mechanisms to obtain the utterance representations that incorporate local contexts as well as the speaker and emotional information. Then, these representations are fed into a graph attention network to model the conversation structures and emotional dynamics from both local and global perspectives. Finally, a fully-connected network is implemented to predict the relationships between emotional utterances and causal utterances. Experimental results show that MPEG achieves state-of-the-art performance. The source code is available at https://github.com/slptongji/MPEG .