An end-to-end multi-task learning to link framework for emotion-cause pair extraction

Emotion-cause pair extraction (ECPE), as an emergent natural language processing task, aims at jointly investigating emotions and their underlying causes in documents. It extends the previous emotion cause extraction (ECE) task, yet without requiring a set of pre-given emotion clauses as in ECE. To solve ECPE task, we regards emotion-cause pair extraction as a link prediction task, and learns to link from emotion clauses to cause clauses, i.e., the links are directional. We propose a multi-task learning model that can extract emotions, causes and emotion-cause pairs simultaneously in an end-to-end manner. Emotion extraction and cause extraction are incorporated into the model as auxiliary tasks, which further boost the pair extraction. Experiments are conducted on an ECPE benchmarking dataset. The results show that our proposed model outperforms a range of state-of-the-art approaches.