A cognitive emotion model enhanced sequential method for social emotion cause identification

Social emotion refers to the emotion evoked to the reader by a textual document. In contrast to the emotion cause extraction task which analyzes the cause of the author's sentiments based on the expressions in text, identifying the causes of social emotion evoked to the reader from text has not been explored previously. Social emotion mining and its cause analysis is not only an important research topic in Web-based social media analytics and text mining but also has a number of applications in multiple domains. As the focus of social emotion cause identification is on analyzing the causes of the reader's emotions elicited by a text that are not explicitly or implicitly expressed, it is a challenging task fundamentally different from the previous research. To tackle this, it also needs a deeper level understanding of the cognitive process underlying the inference of social emotion and its cause analysis. In this paper, we propose the new task of social emotion cause identification (SECI). Inspired by the cognitive structure of emotions (OCC) theory, we present a Cognitive Emotion model Enhanced Sequential (CogEES) method for SECI. Specifically, based on the implications of the OCC model, our method first establishes the correspondence between words/phrases in text and emotional dimensions identified in OCC and builds the emotional dimension lexicons with 1,676 distinct words/phrases. Then, our method utilizes lexicons information and discourse coherence for the semantic segmentation of document and the enhancement of clause representation learning. Finally, our method combines text segmentation and clause representation into a sequential model for cause clause prediction. We construct the SECI dataset for this new task and conduct experiments to evaluate CogEES. Our method outperforms the baselines and achieves over 10% F1 improvement on average, with better interpretability of the prediction results.