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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2026
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19547 |
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| _version_ | 1866913051270184960 |
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| author | Ma, Tianxiang Feng, Weijie Wang, Xinyu Cheng, Zhiyong |
| author_facet | Ma, Tianxiang Feng, Weijie Wang, Xinyu Cheng, Zhiyong |
| contents | Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversations (ECPEC) aims to identify the set of causal relations between emotion utterances and their triggering causes within a dialogue. Most existing approaches formulate ECPEC as an independent pairwise classification task, overlooking the distinct semantics of emotion diffusion and cause explanation, and failing to capture globally consistent many-to-many conversational causality. To address these limitations, we revisit ECPEC from a semantic perspective and seek to disentangle emotion-oriented semantics from cause-oriented semantics, mapping them into two complementary representation spaces to better capture their distinct conversational roles. Building on this semantic decoupling, we naturally formulate ECPEC as a global alignment problem between the emotion-side and cause-side representations, and employ optimal transport to enable many-to-many and globally consistent emotion-cause matching. Based on this perspective, we propose a unified framework SCALE that instantiates the above semantic decoupling and alignment principle within a shared conversational structure. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that SCALE consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our codes are released at https://github.com/CoCoSphere/SCALE. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_19547 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversations via Semantic Decoupling and Graph Alignment Ma, Tianxiang Feng, Weijie Wang, Xinyu Cheng, Zhiyong Computation and Language Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversations (ECPEC) aims to identify the set of causal relations between emotion utterances and their triggering causes within a dialogue. Most existing approaches formulate ECPEC as an independent pairwise classification task, overlooking the distinct semantics of emotion diffusion and cause explanation, and failing to capture globally consistent many-to-many conversational causality. To address these limitations, we revisit ECPEC from a semantic perspective and seek to disentangle emotion-oriented semantics from cause-oriented semantics, mapping them into two complementary representation spaces to better capture their distinct conversational roles. Building on this semantic decoupling, we naturally formulate ECPEC as a global alignment problem between the emotion-side and cause-side representations, and employ optimal transport to enable many-to-many and globally consistent emotion-cause matching. Based on this perspective, we propose a unified framework SCALE that instantiates the above semantic decoupling and alignment principle within a shared conversational structure. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that SCALE consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our codes are released at https://github.com/CoCoSphere/SCALE. |
| title | Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversations via Semantic Decoupling and Graph Alignment |
| topic | Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19547 |