From Coarse to Fine: A Distillation Method for Fine-Grained Emotion-Causal Span Pair Extraction in Conversation

Abstract We study the problem of extracting emotions and the causes behind these emotions in conversations. Existing methods either tackle them separately or jointly model them at the coarse-grained level of emotions (fewer emotion categories) and causes (utterance-level causes). In this work, we aim to jointly extract more fine-grained emotions and causes. We construct a fine-grained dataset FG-RECCON, includes 16 fine-grained emotion categories and span-level causes. To further improve the fine-grained extraction performance, we propose to utilize the casual discourse knowledge in a knowledge distillation way. Specifically, the teacher model learns to predict causal connective words between utterances, and then guides the student model in identifying both the fine-grained emotion labels and causal spans. Experimental results demonstrate that our distillation method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both RECCON and FG-RECCON dataset.