Causal Discovery Inspired Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction

ACL ARR 2024 June Submission4985 Authors

16 Jun 2024 (modified: 02 Jul 2024)ACL ARR 2024 June SubmissionEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Abstract: This paper tackles the task of emotion-cause pair extraction in the unsupervised domain adaptation setting. The problem is challenging as the distributions of the events causing emotions in target domains are dramatically different than those in source domains, despite the distributions of emotional expressions between domains are overlapped. Inspired by causal discovery, we propose a novel deep latent model in the variational autoencoder (VAE) framework, which not only captures the underlying latent structures of data but also utilizes the easily transferable knowledge of emotions as the bridge to link the distributions of events in different domains. To facilitate knowledge transfer across domains, we also propose a novel variational posterior regularization technique to disentangle the latent representations of emotions from those of events in order to mitigate the damage caused by the spurious correlations related to the events in source domains. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our model outperforms the strongest baseline by approximately 11.05\% on a Chinese benchmark and 2.45\% on a English benchmark in terms of weighted-average F1 score. The source code will be publicly available upon acceptance.
Paper Type: Long
Research Area: Machine Learning for NLP
Research Area Keywords: causality
Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, NLP engineering experiment
Languages Studied: English, Chinese
Submission Number: 4985
Loading