Recent Trends in Deep Learning Based Textual Emotion Cause Extraction

Abstract

Emotion Cause Extraction Field (ECEF) focuses on the cause that triggers an emotion in a document and mainly includes Emotion Cause Extraction (ECE) and Emotion Cause Pair Extraction (ECPE). Traditional ECE aims to extract the cause based on a given emotion while ECPE aims to extract both the emotion and its corresponding cause. Recently, ECEF has attracted a lot of attention and most of the advances have benefited from significant developments in deep learning techniques, especially machine reading comprehension and neural-network-based information retrieval. The large pre-trained language model of BERT has also shown effectiveness in this field. Following the proposal of ECPE, the development of ECEF has accelerated. However, a comprehensive review of existing approaches and recent trends in the field is lacking. To address this issue, this survey presents a thorough review to summarise existing methods and recent key advances, illustrate the general technical architecture of traditional ECE, introduce several important variants, in particular ECPE, and provide a detailed comparison of several public datasets. Finally, the limitations of existing work and the prospects for further technological advances in ECEF are discussed.