Papers › Recognizing Emotion Cause in Conversations

Recognizing Emotion Cause in Conversations

22 Dec 2020arXiv:2012.11820archive 2025-07-28

Soujanya Poria, Navonil Majumder, Devamanyu Hazarika, Deepanway Ghosal, Rishabh Bhardwaj, Samson Yu Bai Jian, Pengfei Hong, Romila Ghosh, Abhinaba Roy, Niyati Chhaya, Alexander Gelbukh, Rada Mihalcea

We address the problem of recognizing emotion cause in conversations, define two novel sub-tasks of this problem, and provide a corresponding dialogue-level dataset, along with strong Transformer-based baselines. The dataset is available at https://github.com/declare-lab/RECCON. Introduction: Recognizing the cause behind emotions in text is a fundamental yet under-explored area of research in NLP. Advances in this area hold the potential to improve interpretability and performance in affect-based models. Identifying emotion causes at the utterance level in conversations is particularly challenging due to the intermingling dynamics among the interlocutors. Method: We introduce the task of Recognizing Emotion Cause in CONversations with an accompanying dataset named RECCON, containing over 1,000 dialogues and 10,000 utterance cause-effect pairs. Furthermore, we define different cause types based on the source of the causes, and establish strong Transformer-based baselines to address two different sub-tasks on this dataset: causal span extraction and causal emotion entailment. Result: Our Transformer-based baselines, which leverage contextual pre-trained embeddings, such as RoBERTa, outperform the state-of-the-art emotion cause extraction approaches Conclusion: We introduce a new task highly relevant for (explainable) emotion-aware artificial intelligence: recognizing emotion cause in conversations, provide a new highly challenging publicly available dialogue-level dataset for this task, and give strong baseline results on this dataset.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

declare-lab/RECCON officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Causal Emotion EntailmentEmotion Cause ExtractionRecognizing Emotion Cause in Conversations

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

RECCON

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Causal Emotion Entailment RECCON RoBERTa Large Macro F1 77.06 #8 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Causal Emotion Entailment RECCON RoBERTa Large Neg. F1 87.89 #8 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Causal Emotion Entailment RECCON RoBERTa Large Pos. F1 66.23 #8 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Causal Emotion Entailment RECCON RoBERTa Base Macro F1 76.51 #9 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Causal Emotion Entailment RECCON RoBERTa Base Neg. F1 88.74 #9 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Causal Emotion Entailment RECCON RoBERTa Base Pos. F1 64.28 #9 of 9 Archive leaderboard report
Recognizing Emotion Cause in Conversations RECCON SpanBERT Exact Span F1 34.64 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Recognizing Emotion Cause in Conversations RECCON SpanBERT F1 75.71 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Recognizing Emotion Cause in Conversations RECCON SpanBERT F1(Neg) 86.02 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Recognizing Emotion Cause in Conversations RECCON SpanBERT F1(Pos) 60.00 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Recognizing Emotion Cause in Conversations RECCON RoBERTa Base Exact Span F1 32.63 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Recognizing Emotion Cause in Conversations RECCON RoBERTa Base F1 75.45 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Recognizing Emotion Cause in Conversations RECCON RoBERTa Base F1(Neg) 85.85 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Recognizing Emotion Cause in Conversations RECCON RoBERTa Base F1(Pos) 58.17 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTCausal inferenceDense ConnectionsDropoutInterpretabilityLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionRoBERTaSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections